“Okay,” Sabrina said distantly; she didn’t sound nearly as ready as Jason felt.
* * *
By the time they were back on the highway (with Sabrina driving now), Jason had explained to her about Seito recruiting him into the AC early that morning. He figured it was safe now that a legitimate, high-ranking member had spoken directly to her. If it wasn’t…well, it didn’t matter because being honest with her was more important.
“And you do realize,” she said, “there’s no going back from this, right? Guardian will have you down in their records for good. Silte too.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but they already did, remember? Knowing what you know now, do you really think they would’ve just let me go on living my life?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Hey.” He suddenly had an idea he couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered sooner. “Do you think—after we’re through with this stuff—is there some way you could talk to someone still with the GPA about getting me removed from their records? Like maybe the other detective, your, uh…girlfriend?” Sabrina had said very little of her personal life as far as romance was concerned, but Jason had gathered that the other woman who had helped interview him was more than just her friend and housemate.
“Erris,” Sabrina said. “And I don’t think it would work. I mean, I want to help you, but I’m almost positive they would catch on quick if a lowly detective like Erris attempted to modify records. All I would be doing is putting her in danger for probably no good reason. If you want to go that route, your best chance would be to find an expert hacker with the AC who also happens to be a Guardian lieutenant, if there is such a person.”
There very well could be. The people being held prisoner in the Houston Warehouse were all AC spies and associates who had been executives and other high-level employees in Silte companies. Why couldn’t the movement also have people in the private police organizations? If they were there, they would certainly be high up. He would have to ask Seito or Skexka after the Warehouse ordeal was over.
“It must have been hard to leave her there,” Jason said, watching headlights blur by on the other side of the highway.
“Yes it was.” She was paying almost too much attention to the road in front of the car.
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to sound comforting. Then, hoping to lessen the gloom now heavy on her side of the car, he said, “All this time I had anxiety about you insisting that I sleep in the hotel beds with you, but I guess there was no reason to worry.” Idiot, he thought immediately. But to his surprise her mouth stretched into a genuine smile.
“Oh, I never said I didn’t like men,” she said, glancing over at Jason, who was a little taken aback. “Don’t worry,” she added. “I’m loyal to Erris. And anyway, I may like younger women, but men your age are a little too impulsive for me.”
“Hey, my impulsiveness is why I’m here with you now, so be grateful.”
She burst out laughing and, in a sudden release of the emotions built up inside him, he laughed along with her until his tablet faintly buzzed in his lap. Still smiling, he swiped it to find that he had received a text-only message on his communication app—the old one, not the one Skexka had put on it. “A message from Seito,” he announced to Sabrina, laughter still fresh on his breath.
As he began to read the message, his mirth immediately turned to alarm. “For Joans only,” it read. “DO NOT let S read. AC and PAC breaking apart. Every leader going own way. Don’t trust Ra52. Don’t trust Skexka. Don’t trust valenC. DON”T TRUST ANYONE. Silte wanted riots to happen. Dellia Thomas at extraction point in Houston. Has way to stop virus. Virus is Silte’s final solution. Skexka maybe others want to sell her to Silte. DO NOT let them. Our people already in contact with her. Get to her go with her GET OUT. Me and Steph heading north along bay. Getting on plane and leaving country. You won’t hear from us again. Go with Dellia. Get her to CDC. Get back to Dallas and find the right people. STOP SILTE.”
After he had read the whole thing twice, Jason was silent, his mind racing with every implication this had on their current situation. “What is it,” Sabrina said, jolting him in his seat.
“Nothing.” He hoped he sounded calm enough for her to believe him. “Seito and Steph are safe. I mean, not dead or captured or anything.”
“Good,” she said, but Jason got the idea she was skeptical.
Secrets, lies, betrayals: when did it end? For all he knew this message was bogus and Seito, his oldest friend, was turning against him to save himself—as horrible and alienating a thought as that was. But he had to trust Seito, because Seito was a friend; if Jason couldn’t trust his friends to help him through this whirling mess his life had become then he might as well just give in and get blown away.
That was something he really wasn’t ready to do.
15
The elevator stopped, but the floor kept on moving. Mike stumbled out through the heavy door as the guard (escorts were mandatory in the elevators now) chuckled loudly. Ignoring the stocky woman, Mike leaned against the wall to level himself. After Leutz had left his office, he had finished the scotch on the table behind his desk and brought more up through the delivery unit, all while listening to everything the droning Lom had to say about the Bellowe case. As Leutz’s personal assistant, the secretary had access to information that left Mike disturbed and disgusted—and that was just the stuff they were allowing him to see.
He stared down the night-filled hallway at one of the large doors that led to a lush apartment probably nearly identical to the one his family occupied at the end. It was no coincidence that the Bellowe family was on the same floor as him; Mike would have guessed that even if Lom hadn’t confirmed it. He felt miniscule as he clung to the wall in the dark, less like a senior-level employee and more like one of the artificial personalities now running most of Silte Corp operations across the country. Was there any difference to Leutz and Silvan? Did their incomprehensible minds even register a difference between one underling in a computer and another in a bundle of flesh? Or was everyone they controlled the same?
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. What was important was that it was 11 o’clock and he needed to find a way to stumble the last meters to the front door. Mere’s going to be upset. He was supposed to have been home in time for dinner tonight, for once. Monika Leutz had pissed those plans out the window. Fuck her. Fuck the job. Fuck—
A door opened slowly and Carl Bellowe stepped out, wreathed in a thin veil of light leaking out of the apartment he’d just left—not his own but the one across the hall, the one Diane Salpollo lived in by herself. Carl looked startled for a moment, standing with his hand on the door and his eyes wide, but then he recovered, calmly closed the door and said, “Evening, Mike.”
“Yeah. I mean, same to me—you.”
“Had a few?” Carl said, grinning. “What, are you just getting in from the bar or something?”
The joke wasn’t funny and Mike didn’t laugh; instead he shrugged and said, “Is that Salpollo’s apartment?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “She needed help with a project. You know her, always working. I just didn’t realize being her neighbor meant I’d have homework again.” He laughed a little too long and stopped when Mike didn’t join in. “Well, Mike, don’t drink too much more.” He somewhat hastily crossed the hall and entered his own home, letting the door slam behind him.
As he wobbled on down the hall, Mike wondered how long Carl and Diane had been having an affair, because no amount of scotch would make him buy Carl’s excuse. Lom could probably show him hard evidence if Mike asked for it. But he wouldn’t ask for it, unless he had to. Let them have what privacy remained to them; it was none of his concern.
When Mike finally entered his own apartment—after hanging around outside the door for a few minutes, willing himself to sober up—he found the kitchen lights on, but the rest of the place was dark. No sign of Meredith. At least she left the light on for me, he thought, rathe
r relieved that she had gone to bed already. He plodded heavily to the fridge and rummaged around, finding leftover chicken parmesan and a bottle of water. The chicken he scarfed down cold with his hands, licking his fingers clean of marinara afterward; the water he drained to the last drop in what felt like a few seconds. Sated and significantly less inebriated, he began the long, tedious trek to the bedroom.
But as he made his way towards the stairs, he caught Meredith’s slender figure in the corner of his eye. She was standing in front of a window, looking out.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, approaching slowly. “But if you knew the load Leutz just dumped on me…” He stopped at the couch: Natalie was lying there, sleeping soundly underneath the blanket from his and Meredith’s bed. Her short, dark hair was branching out in all directions against a pillow, and she was clutching another tightly to her chest. “What’s going on?” he said softly.
Meredith said nothing; she went on staring out the window—which, Mike noticed, was reflecting a reddish glare. He looked around for the source but saw nothing. He took a few steps towards his wife.
“Meredith, what are you—”
“Mike, look.”
He wanted not to look. He wanted to turn around, stagger up the stairs and fall through the bed into a deep, dreamless sleep from which tomorrow’s dawn or any dawn after that could not shake him. He wanted to put Natalie and Meredith into the car and drive straight back to New York. He wanted to go back in time and turn down the offer to take the promotion and move to Silte headquarters. He wanted Silvan to fall over dead tomorrow and end all of this insanity plaguing his and everyone’s lives. He wanted a lot of things and not one of them involved looking through that cold pane, that divider between blissful ignorance and the bleak unknown. But for some reason—some idiotic, irrational reason—he chose to walk up to the window beside Meredith and look out…and for the second time that day everything changed.
The streets of Dallas were burning.
16
The dark interior of the black SUV had been silent for entirely too long in Sabrina’s opinion. The quiet left her alone with her racing thoughts. In danger of letting her fear overcome her, she attempted to start conversation by saying, “So are we going in blind, or what?”
The woman in the driver seat beside her who, Sabrina had been surprised to learn, was the very same Skexka who had been giving orders to Jason earlier in the night, shifted in her seat and said, “We have map. Pull out your tab. Hold up for Guff.”
She held her tablet up and one of the masked men in the back—the one in the wolf mask—tapped his own against it. She pulled hers back warily; she trusted these people very little, despite the fact that her life may soon be in their hands. The three men in the back were all stocky and about as friendly as territorial bears. They hadn’t spoken much, but Skexka said they were formerly contract officers with Southern Patrol, a private police force known for its tendency to hire based on how physically intimidating an applicant was. Almost every incidence of police violence in the southern states that Guardian had been sent to resolve by the US government had involved the Southern Patrol.
Skexka herself was a young woman in her twenties, but her face showed age beyond her years. Her eyes and cheeks were sunken in, and she already had the beginnings of lines forming here and there. A headband held back her chestnut hair, which was crudely chopped off at the shoulder. “That’s your guide,” she said, taking a long drag of what must have been her tenth cigarette since leaving the rendezvous. Amidst a deep exhale, she added, “Keep with plan.”
When first explained to her, Sabrina thought the plan was simple: get in, get Adelson, get back to the others. But then she saw the assault rifles and the grenades and the bulletproof armor come out of a trunk, felt the weight of the body armor they draped over her shirt, heard the Southern Patrol goons injecting stimulants in the back seat. It became clear to her, then, that there was only one reason those brutish men in the back were here.
The shiny black handgun they had given her felt cold against the bare skin of her hip. Its icy sting made her shudder.
Outside of the range, she had never fired the standard-issue pistol she usually kept in the drawer of her desk at the Guardian office. It had always been nothing more than a precaution, something she took with her on investigations but almost always left in the car. In fact, she hadn’t even thought of bringing it with her when she hastened from that temporary office at the Sanon building all those days ago. She wasn’t certain she could kill someone, anyway, even if they were trying to kill her. That uncertainty may soon be put to rest, though; from what she had seen, these people whose paths she had stumbled onto were preparing for a firefight—for violent, bloody death.
“We’re almost there,” Skexka said hoarsely. She had been taking the car in what seemed like circles for a while, through back alleys and abandoned lots hidden behind weedy chain-link fences. For the last couple of miles though, they had been cruising along straight down a road lined on both sides by large metal buildings.
The car turned swiftly and suddenly down a side street and then pulled into a dark space under an awning. “This is it,” Skexka said. Sabrina felt as if she was floating inside a frigid cloud, kept in the air by nothing more than a thin belief that she might not die, that there was some option besides moving and plummeting to the unforgiving ground or staying still and freezing to death. “Give me about three minutes to hack it,” Skexka said, pulling out her tablet from the center console. “After that move in. I’ll be ready in case we need to fly out.”
The three men got out quickly and went around to the back to get their guns. When Sabrina climbed out of the car and went around, Guff, the one in the wolf mask, was pouring a glistening clear powder onto his hand, which he proceeded to snort with a loud grunt. He handed a small metal cylinder to the other two, both wearing plain white mannequin masks made of cheap plastic, and they followed suit, making the powder disappear through the little nostril holes in their masks. When the man nearest to her passed her the vial, she shook her head vehemently. He only shrugged and handed it back to Guff, who said, “We all ready? Follow me.”
Passing through a gate in a metal fence, they crept along a narrow space between two tall buildings, hugging close to the one on the right. She had to jog to keep up with the men’s drug-fueled gaits. In the gloomy alley they were almost invisible in their dark clothing, like three shadows holding their rifles in a way that could only mean they were prepared to shoot whatever non-shadow appeared before them. An unnerving calm weighed the night down with a silence so absolute she could hear the man in front of her grinding his teeth. To Sabrina, the entire world around them might have disappeared just then for as much as she noticed anything beyond the loping procession before her. Apes in masks with tools of death and she a timid lamb fooled into following them. The march went on forever.
Then, all at once, they emerged into a dimly lit street, and there on the other side loomed Silte’s Houston Warehouse, standing out against the somewhat derelict buildings around it. Guff stopped them with a raised fist and turned.
“Skex will have the system down by now,” he said, his rubber wolf mask quivering with when he spoke. “Skidz and Ori, take up position on my mark. Sorensen, you move as soon as we’re in. Remember guys, Adelson’s the one that matters. If we can’t get the others out before she gets him, we leave ’em. Ready? Move.”
The men stalked off across the street, weapons raised, greeting death in a way only people pumped full of methamphetamines could. She waited for them to enter through the door—beyond relief when no alarm went off—then started slowly towards the Warehouse to join them. It had been a very large shipping warehouse, capable of storing mountains of containers, with enough space that it might now be two or three stories inside; all the buildings around it were dwarfed by its massive area. Other than the smooth white paint covering the sheet metal and the general appearance of order and neatness, it didn’t look like it housed an a
lternative energy research facility.
But then, she realized, it doesn’t, does it?
As she entered through the glass door, she saw that the Southern Patrol men had taken their positions. Guff looked over at her, his eyes glinting through the mask, and nodded. She shakily pulled out her tablet and found the map they had given her on her home screen. Opening it, she saw building schematics in dark gray and a heavy blue line tracing her path to the prisoner. Wherever guards were suspected of being stationed (based on the hazy information she had given Skexka earlier) they had put red dots on the map. There were lots of red dots: she would have to go slow.
Just as she started down the hallway to the right, a message popped up in the corner of her tablet which read, “Put in ear bud.” She pulled the bud they had given her out of her pocket and lodged it in her right ear.
“Good,” Skexka said. “I was in surveillance system just now. Much better than expected. Updating your map with guard locations. Your path pretty clear.”
The map now showed a few red dots in the corridor running parallel to Sabrina’s path, but none between her and her destination. That other hall must be where the bulk of the prisoners were being held. Adelson was in the hall along the back wall that both of these terminated in at the other end. Some of the guards in the main prison hallway might be able to see her as she passed them, but the lights were dim enough this late at night for her to be able to sneak by in the shadows. It was a sign of Guardian’s lack of experience as jailers that they didn’t have eyes on all the prisoners at once. She wondered anxiously how Guff and his men intended to get the others out; based on all she had seen it didn’t seem likely they would use a diversion or some type of non-lethal scheme. No, people were going to die tonight.
Pressing close against the cold, hard concrete wall and keeping her right hand near the gun at her side, she eased around the corner—then dove to the ground as a gunshot and a booming shout reverberated through the building. An eternal moment of silence followed; Sabrina sat hunched over, icy pistol gripped in a sweaty hand, breath coming in short gulps. If fear hadn’t been rooting her to the polished floor she might have run back the way she had come without ever looking back. She lost the world as her mind stubbornly refused to form a cogent thought.
Dreams in the Tower Part 2 Page 5
