by Wesley Cross
She took off her coat and went straight into her office. There she sat down at her computer terminal and pressed a thumb into a sensor mounted on top of the desk.
There was a whirring sound as a section of her wall opened and a set of fine metallic mesh partitions rolled out. They covered the room on her sides first, and then another section rolled out on top of them, covered the ceiling, and then continued rolling behind her until it locked into the section hidden under the floor. Now, she was sitting inside of a large metallic cube, a perfect Faraday cage designed to block every type of electromagnetic waves going in or out of the room.
A green light came on her desk, notifying her that the cage was fully connected. For the moment, in the informational sense, Helen Chen was the loneliest person on Earth.
She opened a desk drawer, pulled away the panel on the bottom of it, and exposed a simple switch. She looked at it for a few seconds and then flipped it on. The black surface of the ultra-long monitor blinked and then came to life, displaying a swirling mist of gray that looked like boiling clouds.
“Hello, Helen. It’s nice to see you. I was looking forward to engaging in a stimulating conversation for some time.”
The voice coming from the surround speakers was androgynous, but had a lively cadence of a real person. If she heard it over the phone, Chen thought, she wouldn’t be able to tell that it didn’t belong to a human.
“Hello, JC,” she said, shifting in her chair. “I have a topic I’d like to discuss with you. I think you’ll like this one.”
5
Chuck Kowalsky took the stool at the end of the skinny bar across the dance stage and nodded to the bartender.
“What can I getcha?” the woman shouted over the thumping of hip-hop. She wore an apron over a G-string and a tight black shirt with a breast pocket. The shirt featured a deep cut that went all the way to the woman’s navel and teased a view of her breasts each time she moved. Above the pocket stuffed with papers and a few dollar bills, there was a round scarlet-red pin with bold yellow letters: AIN’T YOUR WHORE.
“Jack and Coke, please,” he shouted back and slapped a banknote on a sticky surface. “I like your pin. Keep the change.”
“Thanks, hon,” the woman said. She produced a tall, faceted glass filled with ice, splashed a generous portion of whiskey into it, and topped it off with Coke from a bar gun.
Kowalsky sipped on the fizzy sweet drink and looked around. The Gargoyle was as ugly as the name suggested. It was one long rectangular room covered in a soft rug of undeterminable color. The ceiling was a patchwork of mirrors, which was propped up by a row of tacky white columns illuminated by hidden blue neon lights. Chuck guessed the mirrors had been installed to make the room feel like a larger place. Instead, when he glanced at it, the dancing lights crisscrossing the silver surface made him nauseous.
There were two clusters of small tables at either side of the room and a narrow bar farther in the back. A small dancing stage that looked like an oversized pool table and featured two stripping poles dominated the center of the club. At the moment, a single woman halfheartedly danced upon the green felt, gyrating with the rhythm of the music. She was naked, except for a pair of sheer pink cheeky panties that she stuck in the faces of overeager patrons surrounding the table. A steady stream of banknotes kept migrating from their sweaty paws to the side strip of her lingerie. Every time the wad had reached a certain size, she emptied it into a purse tucked at the base of one of the poles with a practiced move.
Located in the heart of East Village, the club used to be an unremarkable Irish dive bar for a few decades with a much less ambitious name: SEAN’S PUB. But in the early 2000s, an ex-pat—from Kyushu, with an alleged Yakuza connection—named Eito Genda bought the establishment and changed its name to the Gargoyle. Perhaps feeling entrepreneurial, Genda obtained an adult entertainment license and tried to turn it into a strip club. He enjoyed some early success and at some point, even converted a part of the lower-level basement into a set of VIP rooms, catering legally borderline services to the rich and powerful.
But the Gargoyle’s fame disappeared as quickly as it came. Before long, the long-legged models stalking the room turned into middle-aged moms trying to make ends meet. The suits and ties of the clientele gradually changed into flannel shirts and rough jeans. And as the club fell on hard times, Eito Genda found himself reaching out to people he said he’d never do business with again.
It was a fascinating tale, and Kowalsky had known nothing about it until about a week before he walked into the club and ordered the glass of Jack and Coke. First time he had heard a rumor about Victor Ye appropriating the now-defunct factories of some foreign corporation, it came from a less than reliable source: an old informant with a nasty snorting habit. And yet, the sparse details sounded believable enough for Chuck to take interest. In the age of corporate wars, it wasn’t unheard of for a company to have secret locations. But in the world of satellite imagery, it was practically impossible to hide a large-scale construction project, let alone a fully-fledged factory.
But the source had insisted that was the case, and the factory was being repurposed for some bleeding-edge weapon technology. What was worse, he said that construction was done in a few stages by specialized slave labor. The secrecy was so great, he claimed, that after each stage had been completed, the managers of the project disposed of the workers and brought in new ones. But something, he said, had gone wrong at the last turnover and a worker managed to escape. Then, he came to New York inside a shipping container and disappeared.
No, the source didn’t know who the actual worker was. But he knew someone who they traveled across the ocean with. It was a woman named Takara Sanuki, and for the time being she was employed as a dancer at the Gargoyle under the name of Raven.
“What’s your name?” He heard someone say and then a woman leaned on him, an overpowering smell of too much perfume almost making him gag. She had bleached blonde hair and wore a sheer red camisole and a matching thong. While she had done her best to hide it with toner, Chuck could clearly see a scar on her stomach from a c-section. The woman leaned even closer, rubbing her hard, fake breasts into his shoulder. “My name’s Mia. Wanna dance? I’m really good.”
“I’m John,” he said, giving her a fake name. “Maybe next time. My friend came here the other day, and he danced with Raven, and he said he liked it. I wanted to try it too. If you introduce us, you can dance for me too.”
“He liked the new girl?” The woman looked puzzled. She gave his knee a squeeze and then moved her hand up his thigh. “She’s a cold fish. I doubt she’ll last here another week. Your friend has weird taste. I’ll show you a much better time than that corpse.”
“Please.” Chuck held out a banknote and watched it disappear. “I trust my friend’s taste. Introduce me and then you can dance for me too, I promise.”
“Fine.” The woman stood up straight, a frown creasing her face. “I’ll bring her here. Sit tight.”
She disappeared into the crowd, her posture erect and confident again as she pushed through the throngs of inebriated men. A minute later, she reappeared with a young woman in tow. She was slim and on the short side, her hair the color of spilled ink. Like all the girls in the club, she wore a skimpy outfit—a pair of leather shorts that didn’t quite cover her buttocks and a push-up leather bra that propped up her modestly sized chest. But looking at her, Kowalsky had a distinct feeling that the woman’s clothing choices were dictated by how much she could cover herself without losing the job she was hired to do.
“Here she is,” Mia said, bringing the girl closer, and then stuck her hand out. “I’ll be waiting.”
Kowalsky put another banknote into the stripper’s hand and smiled to the girl. “Hi. Raven, right? I’m John. Do you dance?”
“It’s a strip club, isn’t it?” The woman’s English was almost perfect, if not for the way she made her t’s sound like the d’s. “Come on now.”
She grabbed his hand an
d he let her pull him off the stool. They made their way to one of the small round tables alongside the wall, and she pushed him down on the chair, waited for the new song to kick in, and started to dance.
Mia was right—Raven wasn’t a good dancer. She looked over Chuck’s head without making eye contact and didn’t engage him in a conversation. She moved awkwardly, swinging from side to side like a robot who had been programmed to do a job and had no choice but to complete it.
“Listen,” Kowalsky leaned in to her so her body would obscure his face from anyone who might try to read his lips, “I don’t care for your dance. A friend of mine told me about a scary place somewhere on the other side of the ocean. He says that people there are forced to build a factory and then are killed off when they finish the job they had been hired to do.”
She said nothing, but her body stiffened, making her moves resemble that of a puppet—one jerky motion following another.
“He said,” he continued, “you know someone who escaped that place.”
“I know nothing of such things,” Raven said and stood up straight. “I don’t want to dance for you anymore.”
Kowalsky grabbed her hand as she turned around to walk away and pulled her close. “You can help a lot of other people if you tell me how to find your friend. They don’t deserve to die.”
She pulled her hand free and stepped back and away from him.
“Yo, there’s no touching in this club.” A big, muscular man with a shaved head made his way to Chuck’s table. He was wearing a tight T-shirt showing off his physique with a logo of the club on it, and by the way he moved the objects and people out of his way, he looked like he meant business. “Get the fuck outta here before I break something.”
“There’s no need to overreact.” Kowalsky said, standing up, and since the man showed no signs of slowing down, he pulled the jacket aside far enough to show off the butt of a Chiappa Rhino revolver. “I’ll leave.”
The big man slowed down but didn’t stop, and Chuck put his hand on the revolver. That seemed to have an effect.
“Get out,” the man repeated, this time without much force. “Or else that won’t help you.”
“Fine.” Kowalsky reached into his pocket, making the man tense, and then produced a card. He gave it to the girl and after a brief hesitation, she took it. He moved toward the door, keeping a few chairs between himself and the big man, but then stopped, giving the woman one last glance. “You could make a huge difference.”
6
The car went through the gate and proceeded deeper into the parking lot outside of the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The driver checked the markings showing the parking zone and pulled up next to a black SUV with tinted windows. A second later, a passenger door cracked opened an inch.
“Would you like me to check, Mr. Hunt?” the driver asked.
“No, I know it’s him.” Jason Hunt stepped out of the vehicle and dived inside the black SUV to find himself staring at a familiar face.
“It’s good to see you, Jim,” Hunt said, shaking the man’s hand.
“It’s good to see you as well, Jason,” Rovinsky said, settling back into his seat. “I wish it were under happier circumstances. Everything okay? It’s not like you to be late for a meeting.”
“Apologies,” Hunt said. “Protests. We had to make a large loop to find the way around the barricades.”
“Unfortunately, it’s a common sight these days,” Rovinsky said. “Tension has been spilling into the streets as of late. The entire country is a giant powder keg.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, I didn’t realize this until we got here, but when we were pulling into the parking spot, that’s when it hit me.”
“What?”
“This is the place where I met your father, trying to convince him to start the Unit. Maybe not the exact spot, but we were in this very parking lot, when I asked him to look at some documents. He furiously refused first and then, well, you know the rest. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t done it. Some people say that ignorance is bliss.”
“Not to me,” Hunt said, studying the other man. “It’s too late to go back. Whatever happens, we need to see it through. What’s happening with you? You must’ve been relieved to hear the election results.”
“More than I can express. I know little about Price outside of his public persona, but he seems to be a straight-shooting kind of fellow.”
“I hear he might actually leave some people in place from this administration when he takes over in January?”
“That’s what I hear too,” Rovinsky said. “There are no guarantees in my line of work, of course, but it seems there’s a good chance I’ll stay in the DOD. At least for now. But I don’t know if I should. That’s why I wanted to meet with you, Jason.”
“You’re ready to retire? Can’t say I blame you.”
“I wish,” Rovinsky said, chuckling. “Quite the opposite. After the inauguration, I’d like to come and work for you directly, Jason. I think I’ll be of limited use here. Engel may have lost the election, and Price seems honorable, but the system is broken beyond repair. I don’t have to tell you that the wheels are turning faster and faster. Sooner rather than later, Engel is going to make another move. We can’t play defense forever. At some point, you gotta hit back. We’ve just been handed an extra four years to make the push, and I say we make them count. Who knows, by the time the next election cycle comes around, maybe we will have cleaned up enough to step away. Let the authorities finish the rest.”
Hunt studied the man’s face for a few seconds. “That’s what everybody keeps on telling me. Connelly told me the same thing the other day. He’s been pushing to hit Engel directly. Eliminate him.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Engel lost the election,” Hunt protested. “Sometimes I feel like we’ve developed tunnel vision over the past few years. The voters actually turned him down. Yes, by the thinnest of margins, but that’s how democracy works. Isn’t it a sign that the system is still functioning?”
“Is it a serious question?”
“Yes. Because I don’t want to become another Alexander Engel. Some corporate asshole, who’s fighting for power for the sake of power.”
“Oh, my friend, you couldn’t be more wrong if you think Engel is seeking power for the sake of power. Engel, and this might shock you, is actually a man of ideals. He thinks he’s doing the world a favor. He sees himself as the Augustus of this time, conquering the barbarians and bringing them the light and sophistication of Rome. Hell, he thinks he’s literally saving the world.”
“I found Rome of clay; I leave it to you of marble.”
“Exactly.”
“You were supposed to tell me I wasn’t an asshole.” Hunt laughed. “Instead, you’re telling me that Engel sees himself as the world’s savior.”
“If you need other people to say you’re not an asshole, you’re in big trouble.”
“Fair point.”
The two men sat in silence for a few seconds.
“ISCD is scrambling, by the way,” Rovinsky added, changing topics. “They’ve pulled about half of their assets from the field already and are getting ready to pull more. They have no money. It’s getting ridiculous. Even without getting into the White House, Engel’s got enough sway now to choke them, and that’ll happen soon. I don’t think much will change once Price takes office. It looks like he has good intentions, but all the key players have already been bought. That’s why I don’t see how I’m more useful staying on the inside.”
“Engel will be stopped. Maybe it doesn’t have to be us.”
“Yeah,” Rovinsky shrugged, “I’m sure there were some guys in Germany before September of ’39 who said that Hitler would be stopped. We know how well it turned out.”
“He got stopped.”
“He did. And by the time it was over, half of the world laid in ruins and seventy million souls had perished.”
“You know what bothers me the m
ost?”
“What?”
“This.” Hunt stretched his bionic arm, opened his hand, and moved his fingers. The light reflected off the gray metallic surface.
“Something wrong with it?”
“To the contrary.” Hunt closed his fingers into a fist and then opened his hand again. “It’s perfect. As a matter of fact, it’s better than perfect. My sensory input from this arm is more nuanced than from my biological limb. The difference is—I could stick this arm into a pot full of melted iron, and the only unpleasant thing I’ll experience will be the alarm that will go off in my internal vision.”
“Why does it bother you then?”
“Because this is what I should be doing. Not chasing Engel. Not running around the Bronx looking for Victor Ye’s goons. I made a promise when we went public that this tech was going to solve the problem no one could overcome since the dawn of time. We could change the world for the better. Instead, it feels like all I do is making it worse.”
“Look, kid.” Rovinsky stretched his hand out and squeezed Hunt’s shoulder. “I get it. I do. I wish you could spend your time on nothing but improving your tech, but the reality is—unless we defeat the cabal, none of this will matter. Because in the world Engel is trying to build, there’ll be no place for your idealism. Tech like yours will belong to a small select group who will become more powerful than gods, while the rest of the world will have to compete for scraps. Your father understood this. That’s what he gave his life for. I know you understand it, too.”
