Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2)

by SL Huang

  “I was thinking you would coordinate with Mama Lorenzo here in LA,” I said. “We need someone on this end.”

  “Oh, God, not me.” Checker blanched. “I’m really not the right person for that. She terrifies me. I’d screw it all up. And probably she would end up shooting me.”

  Pilar raised a hand. “Put me on that.”

  I squinted at her. “You realize we’re talking about the woman who basically runs the Los Angeles Mafia, right?”

  “So what?” she said. “You need an admin, and I’m a really, really good one. I can’t do anything up in Mammoth because Vikash knows me. But I can do this.”

  “It would make the most sense,” agreed Checker thoughtfully. “I’m not good undercover like Arthur, but I’m really good at handwaving through bullshit science, so a lead volcanologist is one role I can do. And then Arthur can back up you and Denise.”

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked Pilar. “She’s a dangerous woman. You’d be better off not being on her radar.”

  “I knew you cared!” said Pilar, a smile breaking out on her face.

  “If you’re not taking this seriously—”

  “No, no—I am, I am!” she insisted, sobering her features immediately. “But the thing is…I can’t just do nothing, can I?”

  “Yeah, I get that,” said Checker.

  I didn’t. Most people were perfectly content to do nothing, particularly when doing something might put them in the sights of some very dangerous enemies. Hell, I would’ve rather been doing nothing. But someone had to fix my screw-ups, and Liliana…Denise and I were the only chance Liliana had left.

  If she was still alive. If she was still intact.

  “Hey, maybe the Mob will be so impressed they’ll end up wanting to hire me,” said Pilar. “I do need a job, and they probably pay pretty well, right?”

  Checker made a strangled sort of sound.

  “I didn’t mean it!” Pilar assured him hastily. “It would just be nice to, you know, have rent money by…what day is it?”

  “Monday,” I said. “For a few more hours.”

  “Oh. Then by tomorrow. I guess that ship’s already sailed. At least if I get evicted and don’t have an address, the FBI will have more trouble finding me.” She cocked her head to the side. “Wow, that is one sentence I definitely never thought I would say. I’m glad my mother doesn’t know all this.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “We said seventeen an hour, right?” I dug in my pocket and came up with a handful of hundreds. “How much time have you spent on this?”

  Pilar’s mouth dropped open, and she blinked at me. “I don’t—I don’t know?”

  “Well, I’ll estimate, then. And start keeping track better.” She was supposed to be the admin, for Christ’s sake. I counted out the bills and tossed them on the table next to me. “That should cover up through today.”

  Pilar stared at the money and then slowly came over and picked it up. “Thanks. That’s, uh. That’s really nice of you.”

  “It’s not nice,” I said. “It’s what we agreed. I don’t welch on people.”

  “Wait wait wait,” cut in Checker. “Cas’s bizarre non-generosity aside, are you seriously that strapped? Oh my God, why didn’t you say something? I can totally spot you some cash to get you through after this. Hell, scratch that—come work for Arthur and me.”

  “What—really?” Pilar’s face got tense, like a starving person who didn’t want to be rude by stuffing her face. “You honestly need someone? You’re not just saying that?”

  “Nope, we could definitely use someone,” said Checker. “Arthur spends way too long on paperwork and filing because he’s Mr. Neat Freak Perfectionist, and I don’t do hard copies. It’s been getting out of hand. And we like you, so, done.”

  I expected Arthur to jump in and defend himself, but he’d disappeared—only Denise was soldering quietly in the corner. I got up and checked the kitchen. No Arthur.

  Pilar was thanking Checker behind me. “This is amazing. You guys are saving my life; I could kiss you.”

  Checker coughed. “Not that I’d object, usually, but I’m technically your boss now, and if there’s one thing I learned from the whole sleeping-with-a-student thing—”

  Pilar laughed.

  I poked my head into Checker’s bedroom, but Arthur wasn’t there, either. I went back into the living room and crossed to the back door to step out onto the patio. The night air was still warm, though a breeze had picked up now.

  Arthur stood by the grill, his hands shoved in his pockets, his shadow long and thin in the light shining out from the house.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “This whole thing,” he said. “It’s all gone too fast. Ain’t a solid plan.”

  “Nothing’s ever a solid plan,” I said. “Denise and Pilar know this guy. They think this’ll work.”

  “And if it don’t? If he calls your bluff?”

  “Then we run,” I said. “And if necessary, you and Malcolm can shoot him in the head.”

  “Russell.”

  “Okay, Malcolm can shoot him in the head.”

  He didn’t smile. “You’re so young. All of you.”

  “Stop worrying.” I thought of Pilar and Checker chatting nonchalantly in the living room with a twist of concern. I could see what Arthur meant. They were young. “The only ones who are going to be in danger are me and Denise,” I said. “Checker and Pilar and everyone else, even all the Mob guys we’re getting to help us—they’ll be well out of the way.” It sounded convincing. Not like Checker wouldn’t be up in Mammoth, too. Not like Arthur and Malcolm wouldn’t end up in the line of fire with us if something went wrong. Not like I wasn’t sending Pilar to meet with a Mafia leader.

  “Just you and Denise, huh,” said Arthur, a bite in the words.

  My guilt spiked into annoyance. Worrying about Checker and Pilar I could understand, but I was different. “I know the risk,” I said. “This is what I do, and you know it. And you try stopping Denise. Good luck with that.”

  He shrugged, still unhappy. “That’s the thing. Feel like I shouldn’t be helping you. But you all are going in anyway, so…I guess I’ll be there to back you up. But it’s too many ways this can go wrong.”

  “Thanks for the rousing vote of confidence.”

  CHAPTER 36

  BY THE FOLLOWING afternoon, we had built two hundred fake sensors—or “explosive devices,” depending on the person we were planning to tell about them. Checker, Denise, and Pilar had done a good job: the clunky metal cylinders had visible wiring and LEDs fancying them up to look suitably intimidating, and Arthur had assured us the Mob guys had strict instructions about not letting anyone get a close look. Considering that they were Mafia men rather than geologists, I didn’t think they’d have any trouble chasing gawkers away.

  After memorizing the terrain, I’d spent most of the night and morning putting together a fake mathematical paper on exactly how we were going to blow up the volcano.

  “You’re asking the impossible,” I’d groused, when the others had pushed me to do it. “If the math were real, I could write it. I can’t write fake math!”

  “Sure you can,” said Checker. “Just make a purposeful tiny numerical error that will propagate through the whole thing. He won’t be able to catch it on first glance.”

  “How do you know?” Something like that would feel so obvious. At least to me.

  “The people building the Hubble telescope messed it up the first time around, and nobody caught it,” said Pilar. “Really smart people miss stuff. It’s the trappings you want. The show. I’m with Checker; Vikash will respond to math.”

  “Especially as he’ll think Denise wrote it,” Checker pointed out. “He’ll be predisposed to think it’s right.”

  “Write it,” Denise put in. “I’ll look at it. If I can’t catch your mistake quickly, Vikash won’t be able to, either.”

  So I sat down at one of Checker’s computers and wrote fort
y-six pages of dense LaTeX regarding the problem of volcanic eruption, with numbers that were orders of magnitude off. Denise gave it her approval and then edited a few paragraphs to better match her own style and made a bunch of notes on it in longhand, scribbling calculations as if she were using the information in the paper for explosives construction. It would have looked pretty good except for the glaring errors in it.

  Meanwhile, Arthur swallowed maps of the area as well and then coordinated on the phone with Malcolm about their backup plan. He was remarkably sanguine about working with a professional assassin.

  “Just want to make sure you kids all get out alive,” he said softly when I needled him about it.

  “Keep condescending to me and I won’t come save your ass the next time you need it,” I said, but I surprised myself by saying it lightly instead of angrily. Hopefully we wouldn’t be calling on Arthur and Malcolm, but since Denise would be alongside me in the hot seat, knowing I’d have additional hands around if things went south was…nice.

  “Even the best call in backup sometimes,” Arthur said gravely, and I felt oddly complimented.

  We couldn’t put Arthur and Malcolm in any position where Agarwal might see them, so Arthur gave me a tiny GPS chip to slip into my boot and a gadget something like a modified personal emergency beacon that Checker had built him for a prior job.

  “We’ll try to keep line of sight,” he assured me. “Long as it won’t tip him off. But I’d count on us losing visual, so if trouble starts, hit the button and we’re there.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Checker caught a flight to Mammoth that evening, and Arthur rented a large moving truck to transport all the fake sensors up overnight. Mama Lorenzo had been sending people to Mammoth all day, some by car and some by air, and by the next morning her men would be crawling the caldera with GPSs and planting our cooked-up props. Pilar claimed she and Mama Lorenzo were already getting along famously.

  “In fact, she’s a lot better to work for than Mr. Lau,” she said, and then bunched up her face. “Sorry. I shouldn’t say that, now that he’s…you know.”

  Dead because I had screwed up?

  Denise and I couldn’t do anything till the next day when our fake explosives were in place, so I brought her to one of my bolt holes for the night, under strict orders from Arthur for us both to get some sleep. I found the key and led Denise up the dark steps of the cramped building to room 269, where I shoved my shoulder against the door to open it when the warped wood stuck.

  “You live here?” she asked, following me inside and gazing at the stained carpeting and flaking paint of the tiny, saggy apartment. I didn’t think she heard the frank shock in her own voice.

  “No,” I said shortly. It was true; I was using one of my other holes-in-the-wall as my main base at present. I didn’t tell her it was almost as dingy as this one.

  We started for Mammoth the next morning by car. Tegan had already delivered us new IDs for Denise, but I didn’t want to risk burning them by flying, just in case she did end up having to run.

  The long drive was mostly silent. While I tried to remember to avoid speeding, Denise stared out the passenger window for most of the way, watching the scenery change from city to desert to mountains. She looked tired. Worn. A little old.

  The highway that twisted up toward Mammoth Lakes curved through lush greenery and towering cliffs that dropped away into pristine canyons. Not many other vehicles were on the road. I could see why Agarwal had called it beautiful.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Denise after several hours of silence, as I forced the sedan Arthur had rented up the grade.

  “No,” she admitted, the word hitching into a nervous laugh.

  “This all depends on you,” I said. “If you can’t play this, we’re toast.”

  “I know.”

  I thought about what Arthur had been saying, about how worried he had been. Maybe he was right. Denise was a scientist and project manager; she’d never been in danger of her life before. She’d never had to bluff her way through a sadistic maniac. And if she missed the mark, I’d be going down with her. “Don’t fuck this up,” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  Checker had used his online-fu to find out all the local dive bars and hangouts in Mammoth Lakes. There weren’t all that many of them. We figured if Agarwal was keeping a finger on the pulse of local news—and he’d be a fool not to—he’d have to be tapped in somehow.

  We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, just as happy hour was starting. The first pub we stepped into was all thick wooden rafters and cheap beer, with friendly, forthright bartenders who looked like real people instead of the models LA dives usually had, and only a couple of older local men in evidence who slouched at the bar and flirted with the waitresses. We claimed a table and I ordered us a plate of appetizers and some of the cheap beer, which neither of us drank. Denise nibbled nervously around the edge of a deep-fried jalapeño as we sat and watched the people.

  “Y’all here to hike?” asked our server brightly, a robust and sun-dark young woman with a tumble of blonde curls.

  “Yes,” I said, at the same time Denise said, “No.” The waitress looked between us, confused.

  “Uh, she is,” Denise covered quickly, gesturing at me. “I’m just visiting a friend.”

  “Who’s your friend?” asked the waitress with interest. “There ain’t all that many of us locals; I might know her.”

  “He’s not local,” said Denise. “He’s just visiting, too. We’re meeting up, is all.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have picked a purtier place,” the waitress said with a smile. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, thanks,” said Denise.

  “The check,” I added.

  Denise gave the waitress a weak smile. “We were just killing time for a few minutes. We’ve got to be going.”

  “No prob,” said the waitress, and sallied off to ring us up.

  “Do you think he’s watching?” asked Denise anxiously.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  The next pub we tried was dimmer and louder, with a sports game playing on a TV mounted above the bar and painfully metallic music that competed with the announcers. The surface of the bar was a bit grimy and the wait staff didn’t seem to have any interest in conversing with us, only taking our money.

  And this time, one of the locals lounging at the bar was a robot.

  We’d called it.

  The ’bot was an overweight white man, middle-aged and jowly, exactly the type who blended in at a bar in the midafternoon. The type who would quickly become invisible. Who could listen, watch, and report back on anything unusual popping up in town.

  I tapped Denise’s elbow and jerked my head at him. She followed my lead as I hopped up on the next stool over.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The ’bot turned slowly.

  “We want to see Agarwal,” I said. “He invited us.”

  The robot took a sip of his beer. I wondered briefly how that worked; Liliana hadn’t eaten at all. Did he excrete the liquid later somehow? “I know who you are,” he said. “Wait here.”

  He took out a wallet, left some money on the bar, and left. I debated the wisdom of following him, but antagonizing Agarwal would be the height of stupidity until he knew we had an edge.

  “Do we wait?” asked Denise tensely.

  “Yeah,” I said. A skinny bartender with a scraggly beard came over; I ordered two beers. “You’d better take over when he arrives,” I added to Denise.

  She nodded only a little too fast.

  We took the beers over to a table in the quietest corner we could find and sat not drinking them. Denise kept shifting in her chair. Jesus, I hoped she was up for this. It was too late to back out now.

  A little over an hour later, Agarwal—or rather, someone who looked just like him—pushed open the door to the bar.

  He gazed around, flicking his overgrown hair out of his eyes, and spotted us almost imm
ediately. He strode over and pulled up a chair backward to fold his gangly frame onto it, straddling it and leaning on the seat back. “You came,” he said to Denise with a broad smile.

  I shook my head at her slightly.

  “But you didn’t,” she said to Agarwal.

  The ’bot’s angular eyebrows popped up and down. “Your new model can tell; I remember. I’d love to get a look—” He made a movement toward me.

  “No,” said Denise. “Vikash can, if I tell him so. Not you.”

  “I am Vikash,” protested the Agarwal robot. “This isn’t one of our AIs, you know. I’m in its head. Right here.” He tapped his forehead.

  “I want to see you in person,” said Denise. Her voice was tight with tension, but she didn’t break eye contact with him.

  Agarwal drummed his fingertips on the table. “See, that’s a problem. You seem so insistent on it, and I must admit, I fear you may have just a tad bit of bad feeling toward me. Your new ’bot there did try very hard to wrench up my plans. You programmed it to screw with me, Denise. Why would you have done that?” He almost pouted.

  “Why did you invite me here if you think I only want to kill you?” countered Denise.

  “Well, because I always did find your brain an irresistible colleague. I’m weak that way. But not stupid. Come work with me, and eventually we’ll learn to trust each other again.”

  “And until then I’m interacting with the robotics version of you?”

  Agarwal lifted one arm and gave her a grand, elaborate shrug. “It cannot be helped.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Denise. “I wanted to see his face.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  She hesitated, a muscle by her mouth twitching, and then she said, “I’m going to set off the volcano.”

  Agarwal laughed, a long, riotous belly laugh.

  “I will,” insisted Denise. Her face folded in on itself in cold fury, though I didn’t know if she was acting or if she was genuinely angry he wasn’t taking her seriously. “I’ll do it.”

  The robot wiped at tearing eyes. “Thank you; I needed that.”