The Blonde

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Dick?” she asked, nodding to his crotch.

  Jack fumbled a moment, and though he could have sworn he felt nothing but white-hot fear from the hips down, as if his legs had completely melted away into the white noise—and buzzing—of the room, he was faintly relieved to find he had a modest erection.

  He took his cock out of his pants.

  Angela moaned in delight and thrust her hips against the Sybian. Her straining leg muscles made it look as if she could use her heels and knees to snap the saddle in half.

  “Rub it,” she said, eyes shut.

  Jack was only slightly dismayed to find himself doing what he was told, and his body responding....

  Angela bucked as if he were touching her.

  “Down to the head.”

  The door kicked open behind her.

  Someone said, “Step aside, sweetie. We’ve got to ask this man a few questions.”

  Jack, with his dick in his hand, looked past Angela and saw two men standing in the doorway. A dark, curly-haired man in a suit, and an Aryan Nations poster boy, also in a suit, which was considerably more wrinkled. Aryan Man was more muscular, but the other guy looked harder, somehow. Leaner.

  “We didn’t see your FOP card in your wallet,” said the curly-haired man.

  “You’re not on the job, are you, Mr. Eisley?” said his partner.

  “We know you’re not, by the way. We ran your license. You’re not a cop.”

  The buzzing stopped. Angela quietly dismounted. Brushed strands of hair away from her forehead.

  “I came here with someone,” Jack said, trying to find his dick. Where was it? Oh God, oh God. Let’s get it away. Quickly. “The cabdriver. He’s still here, delivering something.”

  “What’s his name, then?”

  “You like being married, Mr. Eisley?” asked the curly-haired man. “What’s she doing right now, your wife, back in Gurnee, Illinois ? Think she knows you’re here?”

  Angela, meanwhile, seemed to float backward, gathering up her clothes from the concrete floor. Mostly, she looked disappointed, like she’d had a long day at the office and had been looking forward to that first ice-cold beer, and, wouldn’t you know it, the damn tap was busted again. As she moved away, the two guys in the suits loomed closer.

  “Want us to give her a call for you?” Aryan Man asked.

  “I just want to leave.”

  “Gotta head back to your newspaper convention, right? Is that why you’re here, newsman? Or you planning on writing about this place?”

  Looking back, Jack couldn’t have come up with a way to make this night any worse. His plans for Philadelphia had been so simple : meet Donovan Platt and try to avoid castration. And everything had gone so gloriously wrong, in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Of course, Jack had always suffered from a lack of imagination.

  Like this now. The curly-haired guy, holding up the cell phone. “Let’s give her a call now, whaddya think?”

  Jack hadn’t figured on that at all.

  Zero a.m.

  The Dublin Inside Her Head

  But the face, his face, that’s all she could see now. With nowhere to retreat but within her own mind, she kept coming back to him. It had been easier to avoid his face in the past two weeks, with the flurry of activity: booking flights, changing clothes, figuring out how she was going to use the bathroom ... all in the presence of other people. Other men. That was the worst part of it, probably. The lack of privacy at the most intimate level. It’s what he’d had in mind all along. Even before their falling-out. Before this series of disasters she had initiated, and he had upped the ante. Him. Him. Him. She suffocated on him. Choked on him. Vomited him. Bled him.

  All she’d ever wanted was to be alone.

  It was why she had left university early, moved out of her mum’s house, replied to that advertisement in the Dublin Times: “The Celtic Tiger Is Roaring! Exciting New Opportunities in Scientific Research. Apply Now, Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, County Dublin. ” She’d sent her resume, glossing over the fact that she hadn’t exactly finished her master’s and had opted instead to stock shelves in a Waterstone’s branch while she figured out her next move. The bookstore gig didn’t pay enough to leave home, but this could. And it was something that vaguely promised that her biology degree would be put to some use.

  She had been stunned when she was summoned for an interview within two days. The Operator met her at the door personally; she was stunned again to learn he was an American. The interview was brief. He asked many questions about where she grew up and what she wanted to do and then gave her the tour, and made a big deal out of all the security protocols. She felt like she was on the set of some spy show, like Alias or

  Queen and Country. Iris scans. Thumb-pad sensors.

  The Operator had told her a fake name at first, of course: Matt Silver.

  (Only later did he wink and confide in her: “You know, that’s not my real name. I’m not supposed to tell anyone that. And don’t tell anyone this, either: We’re a secret wing of MI5. British intelligence. They’re paying us handsomely for our scientific innovation.”)

  He had hired her on the spot.

  He had asked her out to dinner the third day of her employ. Probably thought he was showing restraint.

  Sea bass, he insisted. She told him she didn’t like dark fish with bones, and, like, hello, she lived here. But he told her it was the best, and he wanted her to have the best. What was the point otherwise? She remembered opening the door of her new apartment—after an awkward fumbling at the door, during which they kissed, which was not what she had intended at all-and sitting down on her futon, the one piece of furniture she had been able to take from home, and staring at the dingy white wall for an hour or more. Wondering if she’d exchanged one prison for another. At least she’d had twenty-three years to learn the rules of the first one.

  By the end of the first week, they were “dating. ” He expected her to work late hours. Help him with a special project, for which he’d received special funding.

  And when he explained it, and his eyes lighted up, she did feel her heart swell for him. It was an amazing project:

  Proximity.

  No more missing children.

  No more kidnapping.

  No more hostages.

  No more international manhunts.

  A small voice in her head said, Yes, and no more privacy. But in the months they worked together, the concept of privacy seemed to fade anyway.

  Besides, there was nothing like them.

  The self -replicating supramolecular assemblies.

  “Proximity. ”

  Or as she called them, “the Mary Kates. ”

  She saw the accounts, so much money being pumped into their small research facility, which consisted of half a dozen technicians, Matt, and herself. Before long, she was named associate research chief, and her own salary was insane, and Matt had even found a way to fudge her master’s degree for her. (She’d had only a semester and a half left to go; she didn’t feel like she’d cheated.) She sent money back to her mum, and the first words out of her dad’s mouth: “She’s turned whore. ”

  Then she saw the files that the Operator had tucked away. Shadow files, right on the same hard drives they used every day.

  He must have thought her dumb. He’d left a box open one day. She couldn’t venture a guess as to the password, so the next morning she spread talcum powder on the keys. When the Operator entered the system, she had him paged to a different part of the facility. Then she checked the keys. Wasn’t hard to tell which keys had been touched. A, S, E, V, N.

  She thought about it for a few moments. Evans? Vanes?

  Wait.

  Her own name.

  Vanessa.

  And what she saw, once she made it to his shadow files, turned her stomach.

  4:37 a.m.

  South Eighteenth Street

  After he retrieved his gym bag—almost forgot about you Ed, ol’ pat—Kowalski waited outs
ide for the cab. When it pulled up, he had to laugh. It was the same guy who’d taken him to the airport last night. The dark-skinned guy who was going on about the flat fee. He wondered if there was a flat fee to the place Jack Eisley had gone. Take you from any swank Center City hotel to the S-M perv-out dive of your choice.

  This one, the Hot Spot, was a real screamer: mutual masturbation. Kowalski had strong-armed the cab company to divulge the name of the driver corresponding to the medallion number he’d plucked off the video. Another call revealed the man’s cell number. A quick call to the driver, and one mild threat later, he had a name and an address. And yeah, his boy Jack was still there. Having a good time in a back room, the way the driver told it. “Bribed me just to get into the place,” the driver said. “And I don’t even know where the hell he is.”

  Next, Kowalski called his favorite freak, a glam-vampire dude named Sylvester, who lived up in the Bronx, to give him some background. Last thing he needed to do was walk into a place like this blind.

  The Hot Spot was relatively tame, Sly said. Married guys, mostly, went there to whack off while they watched women straddle high-powered Sybians. Direct clitoral stimulation with double the horsepower of any Black & Decker device. Guys liked it. Gals really liked it. Moaning, talking, sweating, but no touching. Because that would be adultery.

  Ho, ho, people did amuse him sometimes.

  But why would Happy Jack go there? He meets some saucy blonde, gets nearly strangled to death, then goes to an after-hours knuckle-shuffle club?

  Unless ...

  Unless he didn’t want to be alone.

  Knew something bad would happen if he did.

  “Third and Spring Garden,” Kowalski told the driver. “Is there a flat fee from here to there, by chance?”

  Zero a.m.

  The Dublin Inside Her Head (continued)

  Oh, she planned ahead before confronting him. This wasn’t a decision made lightly. First, she created a new identity, courtesy of a girl she knew from childhood who’d died of brain cancer. Kelly Dolores White. Armed with a birth date, it wasn’t difficult for Vanessa to build a new identity out of Kelly’s ashes, starting with a driver’s license. She had to take the dreaded test again, but so be it. She passed. Unlike the first time, when she’d failed and then had to wait nearly a year for another chance. Next came credit cards, and, being dead for nearly seventeen years, Kelly Dolores White had perfect credit. Together, those were used for a passport, the gold standard in identification. If Vanessa needed to vanish, she’d simply become Kelly White.

  Meanwhile, she couldn’t help herself. She became distant. But how could you pretend to love someone you were about to destroy?

  The Operator knew something was coming—a boom about to be lowered. He called. And called. And called. And stopped by, unannounced. Then called again later, to make sure everything was okay.

  She told him she just needed a little space.

  “Space, ” he said.

  “That’s it. Just space. ”

  “To see other people. ”

  “No. Not at all. ”

  “Space, ” he repeated.

  Hurriedly, a package was prepared: USB key, documents, samples of Proximity in vials. She packaged one set and mailed it anonymously to MI5 headquarters—the Thames House in London. Another she packed in her travel bag, the one she carried with her everywhere. The one with Kelly Dolores White’s license, credit cards, and passport.

  When she could stand no more, she set a dinner date with him at La Stampa. The same restaurant as their first date. She insisted he order the sea bass.

  And when the pinot noir was poured, she told him, “You’re not going to finish this project. ”

  All he could do was stare at her.

  She continued: “What we’ve been working on and what you’ve told me are two different things. I thought I was helping you build a tool that would save lives. You’re creating a weapon that can kill thousands with the push of a button. You’re accountable to no one. I’ve checked the financials, Matt. We’re not a quiet MI5 research facility. We’re rogue. You plan to create this thing, then sell it to the highest bidder. You even have someone inside the American government willing to help you. Well, I’m going to stop you. Both of you. ”

  “Really, ” he said.

  “MI5 has all of the evidence they need, Matt. You’re finished. ”

  “Interesting, ” he said.

  The pinot noir sat in their glasses, undisturbed.

  “So are you finished?” he asked.

  Vanessa nodded warily. What was he doing? Just staring like that?

  Matt, the Operator—both fictitious names; Christ knows what handle he’d been born with—slapped something on the table. A thick envelope. Vanessa recognized the handwriting.

  The envelope full of evidence she’d mailed to MI5. Postmarked but not delivered. Retrieved from the mailbox. How had he known?

  “And I know about the virus you uploaded, ” he said.

  An hour before dinner, with a disc she’d purchased on the black market—a superlethal data corrupter. She’d inserted it into every drive in the lab, then executed the program. She thought she’d killed the Mary Kates.

  He reached out across the table and grabbed her hand. “Let me tell you about needing a little space. ”

  She didn’t see it until the last second. The thick needle in his right hand. He stabbed her in the meaty part of her right forearm and thumbed the plunger home.

  “Space, ” he said. “The final frontier. ”

  “Women like you don’t deserve space. So I’ve fixed that. A matter of a simple command I inserted into the program. Before you fried it. And you know what? You’re going to be very sorry you did that. Because I’ve prepared something very special for you. ”

  “What have you done?” she asked, but deep inside, she knew exactly what he had done. He’d tried to get her to play guinea pig for months now, but she’d resisted. He’d wormed his way into her life easily enough without them. Imagine what he would be like with the Mary Kates inside her.

  She was about to find out.

  “Unless you have someone within ten feet of you at all times, ” he said, “you’ll die. ”

  He enjoyed a long drink of pinot noir, nearly draining the glass.

  “Looks like you’re going to be a guinea pig after all. With special emphasis on the word pig. ”

  He took the napkin from his lap, slid back in his chair, stood, folded the napkin, and rested it on the empty plate in front of him. They had ordered, but the food hadn’t arrived yet.

  “Good luck, slut,” he said. “I’ll be looking forward to reading your autopsy report. ”

  4:38 a.m.

  Sybian Lounge

  The dial tone, then ten digits, punched rapid-fire. The cell phone pressed to his ear. Ring tone. “Tell her, ‘Hi, honey, it’s me. ”

  Ring tone. Ring tone. Ring tone.

  “Okay, you’ve proved your point, stop it....”

  “Hello?” Theresa’s voice sounded weird. Maybe it was dry from sleeping with her mouth open.

  The cell phone was shoved into the side of his head. His ear started to throb.

  Tell her, the curly-haired man pantomimed.

  “Hi, honey,” Jack said. “It’s me.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  The curly-haired guy took the phone away and put it to his own face. “Hey there, Mrs. Eisley. How are you doing this morning ? Hope I didn’t wake you. Look, I’ve been hanging out with your husband, Jack, and I have the most amazing thing to tell you.”

  “Don’t do this, ”Jack whispered between gritted teeth.

  Curly Head glanced in his direction, then rolled his eyes and started walking across the room. He put his palm up to Jack, as if to say, Quiet, boy. I’m talking to your wife.

  The Aryan rotated the wing nuts, removed them from the metal clamps around Jack’s wrist and elbow. “Hold still,” he warned. Once he was free of the apparatus, Jack wrigg
led the fingers of his right hand. Pins and needles.

  “Hey.”

  Jack looked up at the Aryan. The Aryan launched a jackhammer blow to his stomach. Jack folded in half, dropped to his knees.

  The Aryan grabbed Jack by his shirt collar and started dragging him across the concrete floor.

  At least he isn’t leaving me alone in the room, Jack thought, and then he coughed, and he swore he tasted blood.

  Zero a.m.

  The Dublin Inside Her Head (continued)

  The first few days she spent in and around Dublin, afraid to go anywhere else, afraid to go home, for fear of involving her family. So she went to the pub, then to the bedroom of an ex-boyfriend from college; she figured she could hole up with him for a week, try to contact someone at MI5. But he was just interested in one-time-only revenge sex; he had a new girlfriend now. “And now that I’ve had you again, ” he said, “I remember you were always rubbish in the sack. ”

  He said this to her at a party; she ended up with the host of the party, his best friend, a pimply guy named J.J. She knew he had always lusted for her. They didn’t sleep together. A few stragglers who didn’t want to drive home crashed on J.J.’s living room floor, and Vanessa and J.J. joined them. He kissed her for a while. Felt her tits. Tried to feel her below, but she kept his focus on her tits.

  The next morning, J.J.’s cell started buzzing while they were all still crashed out on the floor. J.J., feeling full of himself for finally having bedded the elusive Vanessa Reardon. Vanessa, meanwhile, worrying herself into a sickened state. What was she going to do next? She couldn’t stay with this guy forever. And she had to go to the bathroom very, very badly. And not just pee, either. But the bathroom was more than ten feet away, off the living room, in the corner of the flat.