The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  Surmounting the outer wall was no problem from this side; there were plenty of cars parked on the shoulder. I climbed on top of an SUV, put my fingers on top of the wall, and pulled myself up. Then I lowered myself to the dirt on the other side. For a moment I just lay there on the ground, staring up at the mottled glare on the smog that was Los Angeles’ version of a starry night.

  I’d made it out of the DZ.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I staggered through an industrial strip west of the DZ, so stunned to be alive that it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was in nearly as much danger on this side of the wall. Gerard Canaan had obviously made some kind of deal with the LAPD to look the other way while Green River invaded the DZ, and if he had the LAPD in his pocket, not even surrendering would save me. The LAPD has never been known for their restraint or their scruples, and if it were convenient for Gerard Canaan that a certain murder suspect be shot to death for “resisting arrest,” they’d make it happen.

  As the sun rose over the dead freeway behind me, I began to feel very exposed. Keane had said to meet him at Grand Park, which was several miles from here. I was about to call for a car when my comm chirped, indicating a message had been received. Looking at the display, I saw that the message was from Keane. It had been sent just a few minutes after we’d lost contact. The message read:

  -Get code from coin using pencil method

  -Message code to me

  -Go to rendezvous point

  Getting the code from the coin required pencil and paper—two things that were not readily available in an industrial park in South Los Angeles. It would have been nice if Keane had thought of this before sending me into the DZ.

  There were a few offices around, but of course nothing was open at this hour. My best bet was probably a convenience store or gas station. I managed to locate a Circle K on my comm that was only about a quarter mile away, and I was trying to determine whether I should cut through an abandoned lot filled with junked cars or take the street when I noticed red and blue flashing lights just above the horizon to my right: LAPD. The car was closing on me fast.

  It was unlikely they had ID’d me at this distance, but they’d apparently decided a lone man wandering through an abandoned industrial park at 6 A.M. was worth looking into. I had virtually no hope of outrunning an LAPD aircar, particularly since once I signaled my intention to run, they’d call for backup. So my choice was to surrender now or try to get the code to Keane first and then surrender. If the LAPD was working for Canaan, he’d end up with the coin either way, but it was worth a shot to try to get the code to Keane first.

  I took off running toward the maze of junkers. I just needed to make it to the Circle K, ideally avoiding any open areas where the aircar could land. If the cops didn’t know I was a murder suspect, they probably wouldn’t open fire; even the LAPD doesn’t normally execute drifters for trespassing. But if the car landed, they’d pursue me on foot—and I was in such rough shape at this point that I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to outrun them. I zigzagged through the maze of cars, both because I was trying to confuse the cops and because I kept running into dead ends. It was probably hilarious to the cops in the car circling overhead, but I was exhausted and pissed off.

  Eventually I cleared the maze, emerging onto a patch of weed-covered ground—not large enough for a standard landing. The police car zoomed overhead, the loudspeaker warning me to stop running and lie down on the ground. I opted rather to sprint down an alley between two warehouses. I came out onto a road that was plenty wide, but too packed with morning commuters to allow for a landing. Darting through the traffic, I ignored the blaring horns, hoping that the drivers bearing down on me were both alert and feeling charitable. I emerged onto the parking lot of a strip mall shaken but unscathed. The Circle K sign was visible two hundred yards or so to the south. I took off running toward it.

  To my right was a series of stores, any one of which might be harboring a perfectly good pencil, but they were all closed. If I broke into a store only to find that there was no pencil inside, it would be the last mistake I ever made. The LAPD would get to me before I had the chance to try again. They wouldn’t even have to shoot me; if my mission failed at this point because I couldn’t find a goddamned pencil, I was going to shoot myself in the face out of principle.

  So I decided to keep on toward the Circle K, but now I had another problem: I’d been hoping there’d be enough cars and other obstacles in the strip mall parking lot to prevent a conventional landing, but there were aircraft carriers with less open space than this strip mall. Easily a hundred-yard-long strip of pavement, perfect for landing. In fact, glancing behind me I could see the car was lining up to land.

  Only one thing to do: I ran back into traffic. If the cops thought I was going to end up on the other side of the road, they wouldn’t land on this side of the street. Once again, tires screeched and horns blared as a crazy drifter in combat boots and a T-shirt darted through traffic. By some miracle, once again I emerged unscathed on the other side.

  The only problem was that there was nothing on this side of the street but a lumberyard. No sign of any structure that might contain a pencil. I ran alongside the road until the cruiser angled across the street, swooping overhead. Again it sternly commanded me to stop running. Again I did not comply.

  I ran into the street for a third and final time. I was either going to reach the Circle K or die trying, and God what a depressing sentiment that was. There was honking and swearing, but no tires squealing this time; I think a few people actually sped up to try to hit me. To my right I saw more flashing lights. Fantastic, the cops had called for backup. Either they’d ID’d me or they’d decided I was one hell of a dangerous drifter.

  I emerged onto the parking lot of the Circle K and ran inside. “Pencil!” I gasped to the clerk behind the counter. He looked at me with something like alarm, but reached into a canister to his left and produced a pencil. I waved frantically at a notepad, and he handed me this as well, then watched wide-eyed as I proceeded to perform Keane’s pencil-rubbing trick on the coin. I was shaking so hard from adrenaline that it took me four tries to get a quality impression. No time to write out all those ones and zeroes, though. Outside, a police groundcar screeched to a halt in front of the store. I had just enough time to take a picture of the paper and send it to Keane. The cops burst through the door and yelled at me to get on the ground. I slipped the coin into my pocket and sank to my knees with my hands in the air.

  It was finally over. And I was going to prison.

  THIRTY

  The cops took my gun, handcuffed me, and dragged me outside. They did a quick search for weapons, but didn’t show any interest in the coin. One of them held a facial scanner up to my face and then nodded to his partner. Then he shoved me into the backseat and closed the door. I breathed a sigh of relief: they knew who I was, and I was still alive. That meant either they weren’t working for Canaan or Canaan wanted me alive. I was still probably going to prison, but at least I wasn’t dead.

  The parking lot was now swarming with cops; several LAPD groundcars had joined the aircar in the parking lot. An impromptu meeting of the boys in blue was going on, with several cops yelling animatedly at each other and occasionally gesturing toward me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it was pretty clear they were arguing about what to do with me. I found it somewhat unsettling that there was apparently more than one option. Hopefully execution without a trial was off the table.

  After a few minutes of this, the two cops got back in the car. The driver maneuvered around the other cars, found a straightaway, and took off. I didn’t want to antagonize my captors, but I got the impression my fate was out of their hands in any case. “Hey, guys,” I said convivially, “where are we headed?”

  No response.

  The car angled toward downtown. At first, I thought they were taking me to the county holding facility, but to my surprise the car banked and lined up to land on Broadway heading
south, not far from where Keane had dropped me off to meet Olivia. In fact, as the wheels hit ground, I realized we were exactly where Keane had dropped me off. The court buildings and holding facility were a few hundred yards away. This didn’t make any sense. The car pulled up to the curb and stopped. I heard the door locks pop. The cop in the passenger’s seat came around and opened my door. He helped me out and then unlocked my cuffs.

  “Are you letting me go?” I asked, almost afraid to voice the question.

  “Orders,” said the cop. “Captain said to drop you here.”

  I nodded dumbly, rubbing my wrists. “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “The fuck do I care?” grumbled the officer, and returned to the car. I decided not to make an issue out of getting the Glock back, as I’d stolen it from Green River in the first place. The cop got in the car and they drove off.

  I stood for a moment, blinking in the morning sun, trying to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating. On whose orders had I been released? And why had they released me here?

  I turned and walked up the steps. Looking around the plaza, I saw that it was empty except for a ponytailed woman with a stroller and a couple of joggers. I turned left toward the bench where I’d frisked Olivia and began walking in that direction. Up ahead, I saw a man and a woman sitting next to each other on the bench: Keane and Olivia. Olivia was sitting on Keane’s right, with her purse resting on her lap. They seemed to be chatting amicably. I continued toward them.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Fowler,” Olivia said as I approached.

  Keane smiled weakly at me. I saw now that Olivia’s right hand was hidden beneath her purse. She had a small pistol pointed at Keane.

  “What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

  “Mr. Keane attempted to renege on our arrangement,” Olivia said. “After I broke into Empathix last night, he sent me a message telling me it wasn’t safe to return to the motel. Then he wouldn’t return my calls. When I finally did go back, he was gone. Fortunately, I suspected he might try to keep the coin for himself, so I did a bit of hacking of my own.”

  “My notebook wasn’t the only remote terminal she authorized,” Keane said. “She also added her own comm. She was listening in on all our communications over Minotaur.”

  It took me a moment to grasp the ramifications of this. “You heard us say we were going to meet in Grand Park.”

  “All I had to do is come here and wait,” said Olivia. “If you managed to get the coin, you’d show up here eventually. You do have the coin, don’t you, Mr. Fowler?”

  I glanced at her and then at Keane.

  “Forget it, Fowler,” Keane said. “It’s not worth dying over.”

  I nodded and reluctantly pulled the coin from my pocket. I held it out to Olivia. She took it with her left hand, keeping her gun trained on Keane.

  “So you were working for Canaan all along?” I asked.

  Olivia laughed. “Gerard Canaan has nothing to offer me, Mr. Fowler. Nor do you and Mr. Keane—anymore.”

  I shook my head. “Then you really are Selah Fiore. A narcissistic psychopath.”

  “No,” replied Olivia. “Selah expected me to be her insurance policy, her fail-safe. But I’m no one’s fail-safe.”

  “Olivia doesn’t want to preserve Selah’s legacy,” Keane said. “She wants to burn it to the ground.”

  “That’s why you wanted the coins?” I asked, baffled. “You’re going to crash the global economy out of spite?”

  “Spite. Resentment. Rage. Call it what you like. I don’t expect you to understand my motivations, Mr. Fowler. Even Selah didn’t foresee my actions. She thought she could transplant her memories into a new body and expect me to carry on her life’s work. She was wrong.”

  “But you are Selah!” I exclaimed.

  “I was Selah,” Oliva said. “Do you understand what a cosmic joke my existence is, Mr. Fowler? I was born three days ago, with fifty billion dollars in the bank and a terminal illness. I’ve got the memories of a Hollywood legend—and the awareness that I am not she. I’m a universal symbol of mysterious allure—and still a virgin. There is no one on Earth who can even imagine what it’s like to be me. And soon I will die, unknown and unloved. I’m not Selah Fiore, I’m a stranger with her face. You know what I am, Mr. Fowler?” She held up the coin between her thumb and finger. “I’m an iota. Nothing of significance.”

  But all I saw, as the coin glinted in the red light of sunrise, was a mayfly.

  “Is this really the role you want to play, Olivia?” Keane asked. “That of a spoiled child trashing the game because she got dealt a lousy hand? You realize that despite your efforts to enact vengeance against Selah, you’re actually playing the role of the fail-safe perfectly, don’t you? Selah may not have predicted your behavior, but that doesn’t make your actions any less a reaction to her. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t do this.”

  Olivia laughed. “I see what you’re doing, Mr. Keane, and I applaud you. You think you can appeal to my sense of free will, my desire to prove that I’m my own person. What you don’t understand is that I never entertained any illusions of having a choice. My path was always one of destruction. ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

  I recognized the line, from the Bhagavad Gita. J. Robert Oppenheimer was said to have recited it in the wake of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. Where Rachel only wanted to play, Olivia desired destruction.

  Olivia got up from the bench. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure working with you. I’d say we should do it again, but I’m afraid I won’t be around much longer.” She backed away, still holding the gun pointed in our direction, then turned and hurried off down the path, tucking the gun in her purse.

  Keane sighed, shaking his head as she walked away. For a moment I thought he was genuinely disappointed she’d betrayed him. Then he turned to face me. “Why do people always underestimate me, Fowler?” he asked. “It baffles me. Honestly, it does.”

  Turning back to look at Olivia, I noticed a suited man approaching from ahead of her, his hand in his jacket. Olivia must not have liked the looks of this, because she suddenly turned left to go down the steps toward the street. But after taking two steps down, she stopped again, and headed back up the path toward me and Keane. Another man, this one dressed more casually, was coming up the steps. He turned right to follow Olivia, just ahead of the suited man.

  The young ponytailed woman I’d noticed earlier brushed past me on the path, sans stroller, and a jogger who had stopped to stretch was converging from the right. I could see Olivia was thinking of trying to dart past the ponytailed woman, but she reconsidered when the woman produced a pistol from her jacket. The others followed suit.

  “Federal agent,” said the ponytailed woman, producing a badge with her left hand. “Get your hands in the air, Ms. Fiore.”

  Olivia, now standing just ten paces or so from me, spun around to see guns pointed at her from all directions. The agents were cautiously closing on her. She whirled to glare at Keane, who had gotten up from the bench to watch the scene unfold. I saw her right hand was still in her purse.

  “Ms. Fiore,” barked the man in the suit. “Put your hands where I can see them!”

  Olivia ignored him. “Why?” Olivia cried, looking at Keane with anger and pain. “Why the charade?”

  “I had to give you a choice,” Keane said. “I always suspected you were playing me against Canaan. But there was always a chance you’d go your own way. A slim one, but I had to let it play out.” His tone softened. “Please, Olivia. Put down the gun. All they’ve got on you at this point is armed robbery. Make a deal with the DA to commute your sentence. Enjoy the time you have left.”

  “Get your hands where I can see them, Ms. Fiore,” growled the suited man. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Olivia nodded. But when she removed her hand from the bag, I saw she was still holding the gun. She brought it up toward Keane, but with four federal agents pointing g
uns at her, she never had a chance. Half a dozen shots rang out and she fell to the pavement, still clutching the gun. Her body twitched a few times and then she was still.

  Olivia Fiore was dead.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The cops clustered around Olivia, going through the motions of attempting to resuscitate her while Keane and I looked on.

  “You orchestrated this,” I said at last.

  “Actually,” Keane replied, “April did. She’s the one who got the feds to order the police to release you.”

  “But you knew Olivia would overhear you telling me to meet you here. You must have known how it would end.”

  “I knew what Olivia had planned, but I honestly hoped she’d reconsider.” He stared grimly at Olivia’s body on the ground. I’d never seen Keane so unhappy about being proven right. I think part of him had really hoped that there was more to Olivia than there seemed to be, that she wasn’t just Selah Fiore’s vengeful spirit wreaking destruction from beyond the grave. She was never going to have a long, happy life, but she could have made something of the time she had. But she took the easy way out, as people usually do. Keane had known Olivia would be listening in on our Minotaur conversations, which was why he’d made sure to specify our meeting location. He’d given her just enough rope to hang herself.

  “So I guess you met Ed Casters,” Keane said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, still watching the agents kneeling over Olivia.

  “And?” Keane said.

  “Ed Casters is dead,” I said.

  Keane didn’t reply. I was certain that he knew Ed Casters’s true identity. And I wasn’t going to tell him any more until he admitted it.