Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  Helen took her seat and neatly unfolded the napkin on her lap.

  Diana, reeling, followed suit, trying not to keel over or knock a stray fork off the table in the process. The sense of personal violation was overwhelming. Far worse than any physical violence she’d suffered. Her body might house her soul, but her garden was its refuge. This was salt in the wound of its loss, another reminder of eternal primacy from the matriarch with a prim smile.

  I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever tried to grow. Dag’s remark over their pancake breakfast hadn’t been offhand. It had been a veiled threat. Knowing her as no one else had, he had been able to feed Helen details of the things Diana cared most about. Diana treated her own agents like beloved plants, keeping a close eye on them and offering them sustenance, support, or space as they needed it to thrive. But sometimes, despite all her best efforts, things turned sour. When they did, Diana did what she had to, sifting through everything she knew about the person to unveil the few things they cared about most and then turning those vulnerabilities against them. Carrots and sticks were two sides of the same coin. Love was the truest source of pain.

  “Ahh,” said Helen, rubbing her hands together. “Finally.”

  A waiter appeared, poured amber ales, and placed enormous burgers in front of each of them, complete with bacon, avocado, and thick beef tallow fries.

  “Lowell assures me everything was raised and butchered right here on the Ranch,” said Helen. “A step up from Mauricio’s, right?”

  The rich smell of grilled meat, toasted sourdough, and fried potato had once been a hallmark of coming up under Helen’s tutelage. They had frequented Mauricio’s hole-in-the-wall, braving the decrepit DC back alley to scarf down the burgers he prepared with a consummate attention he never showed his customers. It was at Mauricio’s that Helen had imparted so many of her lessons in espionage, communicated in polished anecdotes and careful euphemisms. Diana had associated those tête-à-têtes with the sense of purpose afforded by public service and accentuated by secret duty. Now the smell made her sick.

  Helen ate with enthusiasm, smearing each fry in a pile of ketchup and washing everything down with ale. Blood and grease ran down her hands, and her fingers left dark smudges on the beer glass.

  “I know we’ve had our differences,” said Helen, taking another swallow of ale. “And of course, we’ve grown apart over the years. But if there’s one thing I’ve never doubted, Maria, it’s the love we share for this fine country. You were the best case officer I ever had. And that quality, that drive, can only come from the knowledge that you serve something larger than yourself, that there is an entire nation depending on you. It’s an honor and a burden.”

  This woman, who had killed a president, was calling on Diana’s patriotism.

  Suppressing nausea, Diana hoisted the burger and took a bite, chewing until she could bear to swallow the masticated lump of food. She had to ignore the Michelia champaca. She had to act as if Dag’s betrayal had left her unscathed. She had to pretend that Helen did not in fact hold Diana’s pulsing heart in her manicured hands, lest Diana indicate the thinness of the thread by which her sanity hung. The only way to fight someone who knew your weaknesses was to feign indifference.

  “There’s a peculiar melancholy specific to fading empire,” said Helen. “The Romans, the Mongols, the British, they all knew what it meant to see inherited glory rust away to nothing. America peaked in the final years of the twentieth century, its enemies defeated and its strength uncontested. My rule of thumb is that if a blowjob constitutes a national crisis, then you’re at the very top of your game. Ever since, we’ve been holding on like an athlete who refuses to retire. It’s all a little sad, really.”

  Diana needed to get a handle on this situation. Ever since picking up Helen’s note in the empty greenhouse, it had felt like the world was happening to Diana instead of the other way around. Agency is the agent’s first priority. One of Helen’s spitfire maxims delivered in the cramped booth at Mauricio’s. The only way to move through intrigue’s dominion was like a shark: you either kept swimming, or you died. Another Helen adage rattled home. Step one of any op is to figure out who the principals are and what they want. Diana had finally got to the bottom of the first bit. From Haruki to Leviathan to Sean to Lowell and finally to Helen. Helen was the principal. In any operation Helen touched, she was always the principal.

  That left the second bit. What did Helen want? Why had she dragged Diana out from under her rock, flayed open her life like Dag’s stag? Helen didn’t fuck around. She wasn’t doing this out of some cruel fascination. Sadism was for suckers. Helen always had a plan.

  “So you came up with the idea to nationalize Commonwealth,” said Diana. “You want to bolster the US government by hijacking its corporate star. Revive economic nationalism.”

  “You may not believe it,” said Helen, “but Lowell was actually the one who came to me with the proposal.”

  “Take down the people who ruined his oil cartel with a carbon tax.”

  “Precisely. He was planning to shop it around to whatever government might bite.” Helen mock shivered. “He had Sean over at Apex setting up speed dates with high-level officials from South Africa to Singapore. These mercenary types drive me nuts. It’s as if they believe money is the only true form of power. So shortsighted. Thank heaven he showed up at my door first. It could have been a disaster otherwise.”

  “But you’re already pulling Washington’s strings as a senior adviser to Lopez,” said Diana. “Why is hijacking an American conglomerate worth the risk? It would be chaos.”

  Helen’s eyes danced, but all she did was take another sip of beer.

  “Commonwealth threatened not just US sovereignty but the sovereignty of every other country with the carbon tax,” said Diana, remembering Lowell’s confession. “They overstepped. But Wall Street oversteps every decade or so, and all we do is throw on a Band-Aid and hope the wound doesn’t fester. Why not just regulate our way out of this one? Give Rachel a slap on the wrist, toss a few juicy talking points to the press corps, make good on Lopez’s recent pronouncements, reassure the international community, and so on?”

  Helen rolled her eyes. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Lopez doesn’t know the first thing about this. It’s way above his pay grade, if you know what I mean.”

  Way above the president’s pay grade. If Helen wasn’t sharing this with Lopez, that meant she might actually be serious about doing it. And if she was serious, that meant there was some prize at stake that was worth risking everything in an unprecedented federal takeover.

  A lightning bolt crackled down beyond the glass, forking and writhing as if flung by Zeus himself. The stray thought of Olympian royalty made Diana replay part of the conversation in her head. The Romans, the Mongols, the British, they all knew what it meant to see inherited glory rust away to nothing. In framing the problem as she saw it, Helen wasn’t referencing constitutional crises, antitrust legislation, or new regulatory regimes. She was talking about empires.

  Thunder roared and the house shook. Wind churned up whitecaps on the lake. Rain lashed at the window.

  It was obvious. Why hadn’t Diana seen it all along? Probably for the same reason that had handicapped her career before, an enduring faith in the values this country was supposed to stand for.

  Diana took a long drink as if ale could wash away the realization. “You don’t want to hijack Commonwealth,” she said. “You want to hijack the entire world.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Helen wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin.

  Diana continued, picking up momentum as hypothesis compounded into certainty. “Rachel threatened denying feed service to countries who didn’t adopt the carbon tax, knowing no government could say no. Without the feed, their economies, their infrastructure, even their militaries would collapse. It works because it’s convenient and because it’s neutral, the tech stack that powers everything else. But if you seize the feed by nationalizing Com
monwealth, you’re not going to stop at implementing a carbon tax.”

  “Shock and awe, baby,” said Helen, tracing one of the table’s tree rings with a fingertip. “If we move quickly and do things right, we can put Genghis Khan to shame. Governments surrender to us immediately or go feedless and implode, and we send in troops to take over what’s left. Their only choice is whether they want to be a prosperous colony of the Stars and Stripes or a pile of rubble. It’ll all be over in a week. The first planetary empire.” Helen leaned in so close that Diana could smell the meat on her breath. “It’s exquisite.”

  Diana sat in stunned silence as the scenario unfolded in her mind. Leveraging their digital dependence, Helen would secure universal political fealty, putting the United States firmly in control of global governance. Foreign countries would be reduced to territories, their national governments abolished or repurposed into regional administrations. Even the Prideful Seven, who didn’t run the feed on Commonwealth hard fiber, couldn’t survive without the conglomerate’s ubiquitous software. It would take years to spin up parallel infrastructure. If Helen struck fast, everyone would be outraged, but no one could refuse.

  “It’s insane is what it is,” said Diana. “You’ll start a war.”

  Helen waved a hand. “A war we’ll win easily once their equipment stops working,” she said. “It’ll be no contest. And the best ideas always sound insane until you prove them right.”

  Diana imagined the opposing drone squadrons refusing to take off, tanks paralyzed on their treads, and assault rifles ignoring their triggers. It would be a rout, not a fight.

  “Think about it,” said Helen. “So many of the problems we face today only exist because we don’t have a global government. Human trafficking, environmental degradation, tax evasion, poverty, immigration, pandemics. All of them would be so much easier to solve if we didn’t have two hundred squabbling governments getting in the way. Justice wouldn’t be limited by jurisdiction, and opportunity wouldn’t be constrained by borders. The feed is already global. The economy is already global. Everything is already global except for our political institutions, and that fundamentally undermines their efficacy. The rest of the world might deny it, but we’re doing them a favor. I’m willing to do the right thing even if it makes us unpopular.”

  “The right thing? That’s quite the rationalization from an aspiring colonizer.”

  “Oh, come on now, Maria. You can claim all the moral high ground you want, but we both know that power is power. We have to make hard choices all the time in order to protect American democracy. Anyone with a weak stomach either loses or outsources. This is a way to renew our country and divert the course of history. We don’t have to fade into the geopolitical background like the Brits. We can be better than that. We are better than that.”

  Despite everything, the plan had an outrageous beauty. Advances in science, technology, and economics had driven global growth and given birth to new powers that challenged American hegemony. The pendulum was swinging away from Washington, and Helen’s gambit would reverse the trends everyone had long thought inevitable. Failure would be catastrophic, but success meant DC could dictate a new world order.

  “And that’s why you needed me,” said Diana. “You couldn’t risk official channels because you haven’t told Lopez.”

  “There’s nothing more sensitive than this,” said Helen. “I needed someone with the right skills who isn’t an agency asset. I obviously couldn’t come to you directly. But having Lowell bring you on with a few cutouts in between provided just enough cover. Or I hope it did, at any rate. Look”—she put a hand on Diana’s forearm—“we have a limited window here. Either we make the first move, or someone else will. Other people are going to put the pieces together, and if they strike preemptively, we’ll be just as helpless as anyone else. And that is the real reason I need you for this mission. Any spook I hire on the open market might turn around and sell the intel. This secret is too valuable to share with someone I don’t already trust implicitly.”

  To Diana’s chagrin, she couldn’t entirely stifle the budding sense of pride at Helen’s words. Knowing that you were being manipulated didn’t stop it from working.

  “All day today I couldn’t get your grandmother’s funeral out of my head.” Helen’s voice dropped an octave. Now it was rougher, confessional. “It was raining almost as hard as this.” She indicated the raging storm with a nod. “And what you said, Maria . . . What you said that day reaffirmed everything we do, everything we’ve devoted our lives to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replayed those words. They get me through my darkest moments. That’s why I knew that even though you might hate me for Freeman, you would see that this is bigger than our opinions, bigger than our mistakes, bigger than our individual ambitions. This is do or die, and to the victor go the spoils.”

  Contentment was a condition with which Helen was constitutionally unfamiliar. She was always reaching, stretching, reinventing herself and her dreams. The relentless metamorphoses could be painful and disturbing, but they also reflected a world in which change was the only constant. That’s what had allowed her to remain relevant for so long in a capital populated by upstarts and burnouts. That’s what had drawn Diana to her in the first place. That’s what made this new web she was weaving so compelling. It was a fantasy, a castle in the sky spun from the dark material of clear-eyed avarice. But could history claim a single visionary who wasn’t mad?

  Helen was unraveling Diana’s life and then offering her a chance at atonement. Maybe she could redeem the people she’d killed, the lives she’d ruined, the treason to which she’d been an ignorant collaborator. Maybe Diana could reenter public service with a gesture of historical grandeur. Maybe she could wipe the slate clean by elevating her adoptive nation to a prominence no country had ever known.

  Thunder pealed.

  Helen didn’t blink.

  “You can’t,” said Diana. “You can’t do this.”

  When her grandmother had passed away, Diana had been cast adrift. Stoic and pragmatic, her grandmother had possessed a no-nonsense moral compass. Politics had been the last thing on her mind as she ferried information, supplies, and people during Bulgaria’s collapse. She hadn’t acted out of dedication to high-minded principles but out of a concrete sense of fairness. Invaders were trying to dominate her homeland. It only made sense to resist. When resistance became futile, the only option was to escape. So she led the family to a country that prided itself on liberty, where citizens could say and do what they pleased within reasonable bounds, where even the bounds themselves were ultimately amendable by citizens. It was far from perfect. But it was a thousand times better than living under the thumb of an autocrat.

  “Oh, I can,” said Helen. “And I will. We will.”

  Helen wanted to conquer the world in one fell swoop. Aiding in her effort wouldn’t be a glorious atonement, it would be a second betrayal of Diana’s personal American dream. This woman had tricked her into helping murder a president. After discovering the truth, Diana hadn’t been able to do anything about it for fear of endangering the very institutions she wanted to protect. But she would not make the same mistake twice. Installing Helen as a global dictator would pervert the heartfelt eulogy Diana had delivered at her grandmother’s funeral, the very expression of allegiance that Helen was twisting to her own ends.

  “Helen, listen,” said Diana, trying to keep the frayed edge of desperation out of her voice. “You taught me everything I know about tradecraft. I was just another dumbass recruit. You didn’t have to take me under your wing. But you did, and it changed my life.” It made Diana sick to admit it given what she had gone on to do, but it was the truth. “I never would have landed Amsterdam without you. I probably would have gotten myself killed, or at the very least ended up sifting data in some bureaucratic dead end. You . . . You’ve done more for me than almost anyone. Deep down, I know that.”

  Helen patted her hand. “I know you do, honey. That’s why yo
u’re here.”

  Diana made a conscious effort not to let her own hand twitch away. “One of the reasons you invested so much in me, why you trusted me, is because I was always honest with you.”

  “Speaking truth to power is easier said than done,” said Helen, nodding encouragingly. “We want your input on this operation, especially on the tactical side of the false flag we have planned. We need an excuse to justify swooping in on Commonwealth in order to distract the rest of the world from our actual objective. You’ve already supplied some great initial material from the latest board meeting. I know what we need to achieve, but we need your expertise to figure out exactly how to get there. It goes without saying that you’ll be leading the field op.”

  “Helen,” said Diana, repeating her name as if the invocation might aid her plea. “This is a mistake. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you need to listen to me. You said you never doubted the love we share for this country, that what I said to honor my grandmother means something to you. Well, the reason that my love runs so deep is because I’ve experienced what it is to be conquered.” Smoke smudging out the sun. Alarms wailing in the distance. Flocks of drones raining death. An uncanny smell that was sweet and acrid all at once. Quiet pride transformed into abject resignation. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the stories my grandmother refused to tell, it’s that the only way to lead is by example. This country was founded on rebelling against a foreign monarch. We are a symbol of self-determination, of the power of independence. If we become what we once resisted, we lose everything. We achieve so much more as a bastion than we ever could as an empire.”

  Helen’s expression hardened, and Diana spoke faster and faster. “It’s not too late. Lopez doesn’t even know. We can still scuttle the operation and pretend this conversation never happened. There’s already enough evidence to launch a congressional investigation and bring in a special prosecutor. We can lead a global regulatory reform of feed governance, champion it at the UN, show that just as Commonwealth’s technology was developed here, so too can we pioneer the effort to make it fair and accountable. Lowell will still get his revenge because we’ll rein in Rachel. Washington will be hailed as a paragon instead of a tyrant. You’ll win without sacrificing anything.”