by Max Barry
“So where can I go?”
“How about Singapore? Singapore’s real nice. I can get you a great price on—”
“Not Singapore,” Billy said. He was pretty sure this travel agency had some kind of deal with Singapore; they tried to talk everyone into visiting. “I need somewhere with mountains. I want to go skiing.”
“Skiing?” Her eyes widened.
“Yeah.”
“Wow. Okay, then.” She poked at her computer. “Well, there’s Alaska, that’s right up north. And Canada, of course.”
Billy was hoping for something more exotic. “Anything farther away?”
“Okay, lemme see here.” Billy waited while she flicked through screens. “You wanna go to New Zealand?”
“Where?” Billy said.
But he liked New Zealand, he really did. At first he was apprehensive: it was so far away, tucked down in the bottom of the world like something Australia coughed up. But he landed in Auckland Airport and the people spoke American and there were McDonald’s and Coca-Cola machines everywhere and he felt relieved: it was a USA country, after all. He was feeling good when he asked the hotel concierge about the best places to ski, and then the guy laughed so hard he had to sit down. “Ski season?” he said. “Buddy, you’re too late. It’s spring.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on,” the concierge said. “You know the Southern Hemisphere has backward seasons, right?”
“You’re shitting me,” Billy said, but the concierge wasn’t: the concierge was telling the truth. He couldn’t believe it. Spring in October! Who would have thought?
Hoping to catch the last vestiges of snow, he caught a ferry to New Zealand’s South Island and a bus down to Invercargill, where it was freezing all year round. On the bus he met some backpackers from Massachusetts. They wanted to go somewhere exotic, they told Billy; they wanted something different. “We’ve done Laos, Thailand, everything,” one of the girls said. “You know the first thing we saw when we got off the boat at Ko Phangan? A Starbucks.” She looked disgusted. “Everything’s Americanized. We should have stayed home.”
“Yeah, right,” Billy said, although he didn’t see what was wrong with being able to get good coffee in Thailand. The girl was pretty cute. “I’m here for the skiing. We could get a package together, maybe—”
“Skiing, uh-uh,” the other girl said. “No sanitized experiences, thank you.” She wasn’t so cute.
He disembarked alone in Invercargill and walked the main street looking for a cheap hotel. But first he came across an NRA office: a squat, professional-looking building with National Rifle Association Ltd embossed in black letters on gray. He looked at it for a while. Then he went in. He was browsing the bulletin board for local shooting ranges when the receptionist said, “Would you like to join the local chapter, sir?”
Billy looked at her. She was young and blond, wearing a blue sweater. It fitted her very nicely.
“If you’re going to be staying in town.” She smiled. Crumpled on the desk beside her was a ski parka.
“I’m staying,” Billy said.
He was on an NRA shooting range east of Invercargill when they approached him. There were two of them, both wearing blue suits. Neither of them seemed to be carrying guns. Billy nodded at them as he reloaded his rifle. He’d bought it at member discount prices: a Colt M4A1 carbine, sleek and heavy, thirty rounds to a clip.
“Nice shooting,” one of the men said, smiling. He had a detectable accent, which was rare: most New Zealanders just sounded as if they were from California. His hair was slicked back. Both men were wearing sunglasses.
“Thanks.” He slotted the next clip in. “You guys shooters?”
The man glanced at his companion. “Yeah, you could say that. You’re Billy Bechtel, right? You’re new here?”
“Yep.” He fired. A stuffed dummy a hundred meters away spat a puff of feathers from its head.
“Funny, I didn’t know Bechtel had anything going on down here.”
Billy looked at him. The truth was he wasn’t Billy Bechtel anymore, of course: he was just Billy, unemployed wanderer. But it was too embarrassing to announce yourself without a surname. People thought you were a bum. “I’m on vacation.”
“Right. Seeing the sights, eh? Getting to know a few of the locals?”
He wondered if they knew he’d dated the NRA receptionist. They’d gotten a little hot and heavy last night in her car. Maybe one of these guys was her father. He tightened his grip on the rifle.
“Well, Billy, we’d like you to work for us.”
“Uh-huh. And who are you?”
“The NRA,” the man said, and smiled broadly. He was creeping Billy out a little. “You’d be surprised what we’re doing these days, Billy, you really would. The NRA isn’t just about pamphlets and gun shows anymore.”
“We need men like you,” the second guy said. “Men just like you. And we pay well.”
“Yeah? For what?”
The man turned and looked out at the target. Billy could see the dummy reflected in his sunglasses. “That’s some nice shooting, all right. That’s really nice shooting.”
7 Mercedes-Benz
“Woo!” a broker said, sloshing champagne on his arm. “Shit! Sorry, Buy.”
“That’s okay.”
“Come on, loosen up.” She took his arm. “They’ll approve your trades. I’m sure they will.”
Buy was sitting on one of the desks, his tie slung. He had averaged four hours’ sleep for the last five days. Around him, brokers drank and laughed and shook hands. It was 6:15 P.M., Friday, October 31. The financial year was officially over. “I am loose.”
“Leave him alone,” Cameron said, putting a hand on Buy’s shoulder. Cameron was the floor manager, and he would be sacking Buy in a few minutes, Buy suspected. “The guy’s put in a heroic week.”
“Well, the suspense is fucking killing me,” the woman said. “When do we find out if they’re canning him?”
“I’m expecting—”
“Don’t say you’re expecting the call any minute.”
“Lisa,” Cameron said. “As soon as I know, I’ll announce it.”
“Well, I think you did the right thing, Buy. That was a gutsy move, promising to eat the commission if the stock fell. Really gutsy.” She looped her arm through his. “A few of us are hitting the bars tonight. Want to come? I think you should.”
“I just want to go to bed. But thanks.”
“Okay.” She took her arm back. “See you Monday, I hope.”
When she left, Buy said, “Am I fired?”
Cameron considered. “Depends whether they want to make an example out of you more than they want to book your trades.”
“Maybe they’ll only disallow Mutual Unity,” Buy said. “Just enough to push me under quota.”
“Buy, we don’t fire everyone who misses quota.”
“Who missed quota but wasn’t fired?”
“I’m saying theoretically,” Cameron said. “It’s not automatic, is what I mean.”
“Oh,” Buy said.
“Cameron? Call from Head Office.”
Everyone stopped talking. “Thank you,” Cameron said. His office was up some stairs and glass-encased, so he could look over the trading floor. Everyone watched him ascend.
“Well,” Buy said. “It’s been fun working with you.” He felt giddy.
There was a knock on glass. He looked up. Cameron had his phone tucked under his ear. He gave Buy a thumbs-up.
He felt himself go faint. People surrounded him, slapping him on the back and shouting. Relief rushed through him like a physical thing and then he couldn’t stop laughing.
All he wanted to do was sleep, but halfway home the Chad-stone Wal-Mart mall called out to him. He deserved something to celebrate after today, didn’t he? He deserved something really expensive. Buy turned the wheel.
Inside the mall, he found a bank of ATMs installed at the base of a series of mezzanine floors,
like peons gathered to stare up at a glass sky. A Mercedes-Benz dealer was conducting a raffle in the center, and Buy looked at the cars with interest. He had two cars already, but his Saab was no longer current-year. Maybe he deserved a new car.
A dark-haired schoolgirl was taking forever at the terminal. He peered over her shoulder. She was getting out a loan. He sighed.
The girl glanced at him. “I can’t get it to work.” With alarm, Buy saw tears forming in her eyes. “I’ve been trying—I really need—”
“Maybe you should try a different machine.”
“None of them will loan to me!”
“How much do you need?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Oh.” He smiled sympathetically.
She stood there a moment. Buy thought she might be about to scream. Then she walked away.
He stepped up to the machine and inserted his card. His current balance was a little over a hundred thousand. On impulse, he looked after the girl. She was pushing through shoppers, heading for the exit.
He pulled out five thousand: fifty hundred-dollar bills. Then he hurried after the girl. “Hey!” She didn’t turn until he put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Here.”
“What?”
“It’s a present.” Her eyes widened, staring at the cash. Buy felt elated, better than he had in months. “Go on, take it. Get yourself something nice.”
Her hand crept up and wrapped around the notes. “Why—why would you do that?”
“I’m celebrating.”
“Thank you so much! Oh my God, thank you so much!”
“What’s your name?”
“Hayley! I’m Hayley McDonald’s!”
“I’m Buy,” he said. “Have fun.”
8 Violet Enterprises
Hack was jumpy as hell tonight, and he was driving Violet nuts. She was working sixteen-hour days to finish her software, and with two days to deadline she didn’t have time to talk him out of his tree again. There was a lot riding on this: it was her big chance. Three months of coding based on a year’s worth of research and an idea so brilliant it had stopped her dead in the street one day; she couldn’t throw that away to deal with Hack’s latest drama.
Hack started tapping his foot, jiggling her laptop. “Hack. Please.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked at her plaintively.
“It’s not your problem, Hack.”
“I’m killing somebody,” he whispered.
“You’re not. You just passed on a job. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
He started jiggling his foot again.
“Have a drink,” Violet said. “Go down to the supermarket, buy some drugs.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then do something else! I don’t have time for this!”
He looked at her screen. She resisted the urge to snap the lid shut. “You working on your program?”
“Yes. The security software.” This wasn’t strictly accurate, but it was less complicated than the truth, which was: the virus. Nontechnical people had trouble appreciating Violet’s vision.
“Need any help?”
“No.” She forced herself to say: “Thanks.”
“Okay.” He walked over to the window and looked up at the sky. Violet went back to her code. She was almost lost in it when he said, “I hope it’s no one nice.”
“I’m sure it’s not, Hack,” she said, not really paying attention.
9 Government
She was wearing a long coat, to hide what was underneath. Her hair was tucked into a shawl. She wore dark sunglasses, although they couldn’t conceal the barcode tattoo beneath her left eye. But she didn’t mind that. It made it harder for people to tell what she was.
The Chadstone Wal-Mart mall was six stories in places, and mezzanine-style all the way down. The Nike Town was on the fourth level. She glanced down as she stepped off the escalator. On the ground floor, shoppers flowed around two gleaming Mercedes automobiles.
There was already a crush around the Nike Town, made up of maybe four dozen teenagers, most in school uniforms. The store had its shutter down, but a bald man in a suit was talking through it. He waved his arms excitedly. The kids rattled the shutter in response. The doors to the Nike Town had long, metal swooshes as handles, she saw, tapering to a point: they looked pretty dangerous. She hoped none of these teenagers were going to impale themselves.
There was a Barnes & Noble a few stores down with a nice reflective window, so she stood in front of it. For twenty minutes, she saw no one likely to be her target. At one point she caught herself reading the jackets of the books in the window, and jerked her eyes away. Possibly the book of the year, the jacket had said, which she found unlikely. This was Barnes & Noble’s Non-Best-Selling Authors floor.
After thirty-five minutes, she saw a young man in camouflage pants. He was on the side opposite to the Nike Town, across the gap, leaning on the guardrail. He lit a cigarette. From the bulge in his jacket, he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. There was thirty feet of air between him and the Nike Town, which would protect him from the crowd, and an emergency exit directly behind him. There was no doubt. This was her target.
The kids had been chanting for five minutes—O-PEN, O-PEN, O-PEN-—but now they started shrieking, almost screaming. Girls waved rolls of money, jumping in excitement. Then the Nike Town shutter clattered upward and the noise turned into a cacophony. The teenagers stampeded: she saw a boy go down, crying out. She turned and began walking quietly toward the store, glancing at the target. He was straightening, tossing aside his cigarette.
“Sold!” a man shouted. In the Nike Town, four girls wearing McDonald’s school uniforms were screaming with delight, holding a box of Mercurys—no, four boxes. And there were more: the shelves were lined with them. Her information had been wrong. This store had more than five pairs. It had dozens.
The girls forced their way out of the store, talking excitedly. The target slipped a hand in his jacket.
“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe we each got a pair!”
“We should get more—we should go back in—”
The girls squeezed past her. She kept still, unable to move until the target did. The last girl, the one with dark hair, moved directly in front of her. She could smell the girl’s perfume.
A man in the crowd pressed a gun to the back of the girl’s neck.
Her instinctive reaction—the emotion that burst across her brain first—was disappointment. Wrong one, I targeted the wrong one. Then the gun fired, sharp and loud. The girl went down. The crowd screamed and flinched like a single animal. The assassin was a muscular young man in a black T-shirt. He was five feet away from her, and their eyes met.
“They’re killing people for their Mercurys!” someone shouted, and the crowd surged. The assassin broke for the Barnes & Noble.
She threw off her coat and hefted the machine gun concealed inside it. It was a Vektor SS77: heavy and awkward, but capable of nine hundred rounds a minute. Four steps to her right took her out of the crowd. She dropped to her knee and squeezed the trigger.
He zagged as if he’d known it was coming, and she blew out the Barnes & Noble window, disintegrating novels. She tracked him as quickly as she was able to with the Vektor shuddering against her shoulder, and tore up the floor in thick plaster chunks. The assassin dived through the Toys “R” Us window.
She dropped the Vektor and broke out her two .45s. He was scrambling for his footing among the display of life-sized Barbie dolls; she wasn’t fortunate enough for him to have cut his throat on the plate glass, it seemed. She squeezed the triggers, letting the pistols go fully automatic. The arm of a Doctor Barbie exploded; she tore a Prom Queen Barbie in half. The assassin rolled and vanished into the store.
She pulled off her glasses and shawl and ran. This was not good: she was not going to be able to chase down muscular young men in T-shirts, not with the amount of body armor she was wearing. She ran anyway.
The as
sassin had reached the in-store escalators. There were shoppers everywhere, staring at her. “Out of the way!” she shouted. “Get down!”
They scattered, and she dived for the escalator, landing on her stomach and sliding, leading with her .45s. There was a man at the bottom, looking up, and she almost put him down before recognizing he wasn’t the target. She regained her feet and looked around. Toys “R” Us was like a bowling alley, nothing but endless aisles. “Which way? Where’d he go?”
He pointed at the nearest aisle. She ran, but it was empty. Fluorescent-lit racks of Star Wars characters stood mutely. She moved to the next aisle, then the next.
It was quiet. No panting, no running, no shrieking shoppers. This meant the assassin had gone native, trying to blend in with the crowd. She ran for the exit.
A checkout boy saw her guns and hollered. She jumped the turnstile and kept running. A crowd had gathered at the railing to stare up at the Nike Town on level four. And a man was walking briskly toward the central escalators, a well-built young man in a black T-shirt.
She pushed through the crowd to the edge of the mezzanine and clambered up onto the railing. When she could see him clearly, she balanced herself with her legs and shouted: “Freeze!” Her voice echoed. “This is the Government!”
He turned. It was the assassin. Less than two feet in front of him, the escalator churned. He looked at it, then at her.
“Don’t move!”
He raised his hands.
Thank Christ, she thought. She gestured with a pistol, and he stepped away from the escalator. She glanced down to see if it was clear for her to jump down from the railing.
The thing was: she should have seen it coming. She had identified him from the beginning, when she saw his reflection in the window of Barnes & Noble. She should have realized there were two of them.
