by Alex Hughes
“She doesn’t have to be happy. What, exactly, did this apology look like?”
Reluctantly, haltingly, I ran him through the conversation as it had happened.
He sat back, the tinge of disappointment in the air. “Ah, Adam. That wasn’t an apology. Not for a wrong as big as you made against her.”
“I sent her the letter you made me send. Her and Emily both.”
“I saw those. I asked you to rewrite them.” He looked sad, almost.
“What do you want me to do, Swartz? She doesn’t want to hear from me. I said I was sorry.” I hated saying I was sorry. It stung like the fires of hell every time.
“I need you to apologize, and mean it. To do your best to make restitution, as best you can, so you can make a start on forgiving yourself.”
“I don’t deserve forgiveness.” The words popped out of my mouth before I could call them back. I flushed, embarrassed even to say the words, words I knew Swartz would hate.
But he didn’t yell. Instead, looking grave, he put a hand on the table. “Let’s talk about that today.”
* * *
It was a brutally hard day in the interview rooms, and I returned home to find Stone in my apartment.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, from the open door. I’d left the damn thing locked. “You can’t just barge into my apartment.”
Stone looked up from a pile of my belongings, what few I owned, now all concentrated in a pile on the couch. His hands had the characteristic shininess of high-grade skin sealant. “Technically, I can. You’re still a telepath, still under Guild jurisdiction. Your apartment is under the same rules as your personal living quarters at the Guild complex. I can search whatever I wish.”
“Give me that.” I yanked the jacket out of his hands, the jacket whose seams he’d been fondling—like I’d hide something there. Please. “These are my things. Mine. And there’s already an army of people who make sure I’m on the up-and-up. I don’t need you too.”
Stone pulled out a small bottle of Dissolve and a rag from a pocket. He soaked the rag and rubbed the sealant off his hands; the Dissolve had a painfully sharp smell, like oranges on steroids, oranges with bad attitudes and big guns. My head swam from the pungent smell, but I didn’t step back. That’s what he wanted me to do.
“You need to leave. Now.”
He threw the rag in the trash can next to the tiny counter where the sink and stove fought for space with the microwave, and washed his hands. He shut off the water and looked for a towel. At finding none, he held his hands up and shook them over the sink three times, with precision. He turned. “I’ve already gone through your apartment. There’s traces of an illegal substance in a hiding place in the wall over your bed.” The implication—clearly sent through Mindspace strong enough for me to catch even when tired—was that he could use this information against me with the cops.
Now I was pissed. “Cherabino already knows about that. Swartz told the whole crew, okay? It’s old news.” I was grateful I’d never made it down to Fulton County to restock. There was literally nothing he’d be able to find here to use against me. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it. I’m not going back to work for the Guild. It’s just not going to happen, and you going through my things isn’t helping your case.”
He leaned against the counter, weight still on the tips of his toes so he could move. “You realize you have Level Two Restricted Technology in the walls of your room? A proprietary Guild design at that.”
I stopped. Okay, maybe that one was an issue. “It’s Dane’s design. He gave it to me. It helps me sleep without Mindspace and precog dreams. In the normal world, you need crap like that just to get by. Nobody has Guild-level shields out here, and even if they did, I couldn’t afford them. It’s none of your business.”
“I doubt the normals would see it quite that way. I doubt your girlfriend would see it quite that way.”
“What?” It took me a second. “You mean Cherabino? What is it with you people and girlfriends? What are you going to do, tell her I stole illegal Guild technology?”
“I wouldn’t have to. The normals see the Tech and that’s it. You’ll be up on charges by the end of the day.”
“And the Guild would fulfill the sentence under Koshna. Clever. But you can’t risk me telling where I got the design. I don’t have to keep Guild secrets, you know.”
Now he pushed up from the counter. “Make no mistake, Adam, I am willing to play this game awhile. But if I think you’ll become a real threat to the Guild . . .” A vivid image of my death came across the room, with notations and illustrations of where in the brain he’d hobble me before he did it. I was somewhat impressed by the strength and detail of the sending, again more than loud enough for my addled mind to pick up. The threats, however, weren’t nearly up to the level of creativity of my usual interviewee.
The difference was, he was in a position to follow through with them. “You’ve made your point.”
“You’re in a valuable position, a trusted position, working for the normals. If you won’t go back to the Guild, we’re happy to work with you. Your help on certain situations in exchange for your independence.”
“I already have my independence, no thanks to the Guild.” I took a step forward. “Listen, you shoot me if you’re going to shoot me. I’m not going along with this.” I waited a long moment, tensed for a full-out mind battle. Waiting, to defend myself with rusty skills and what little power I had to command this time of night. I couldn’t beat him, not now, not in my present state, but I could at least make him work for it.
“I need your cooperation for the mind tag,” Stone said quietly. “You’re trained enough that if I try to do something to you surreptitiously, either it won’t work or you’ll undo it. And this is not the kind of monitoring that responds well to force. I need to know the truth, not whatever you think I want to hear. So I’m willing to be patient. But your so-called friends at the department are blocking my search, with financial records, with employment files. Mark my words, I will find out everything. Everything. And I will make my ruling. You will agree to the mind tag. You will cooperate.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll reveal to your employers exactly what you’ve been hiding from them. Not just the Tech, but the healing period you’ve been hiding from them, the unreliable telepathy. How long do you think you’ll keep that job then?”
“I’m already losing it, damn it!” I lashed out at him in anger—only to have my mental fist locked in a grip as hard as concrete. I tried to pull away—
And there he was, taking from me the information sitting on the top of my mind. The job offer from the FBI, my guilt over Emily’s death and my determination to catch the hit man who murdered her, and my Link with Cherabino. My accidental, unethical Link with Cherabino.
He slid down to try to find it—and I pulled free.
By instinct I hit him with the pain of a crushed nerve, with the deep, unthinkable nerve pain radiating from his whole body. I gritted my teeth, enduring the same pain and more, and hurt him, hurt him badly. But I was out of practice, exhausted and weak; I had to let it go almost immediately.
Both of us breathed hard, aftermath of the pain. He was slumped, lines deep on his face from the strain. A group of light flashes, almost like fireworks, settled in to my right field of vision. And the mother of all headaches came to visit me inside my skull.
But I had done it. I had done something I had not been able to do in weeks, not since before the injury.
“I’m not a lightweight,” I said. “Furthermore, I hold a grudge. If you screw with me, I will find you, and I will take you down. You have your job to do. But trust me. One iota out of line, and you will regret it. I am not a good person when I have nothing left to lose.” I grabbed his shirt and frog-marched him out of the apartment, through that still-open door.
Stone simp
ly reached out and cut my motor functions—I slumped to the floor. My control came back halfway through, just in time for me to keep my head from hitting the floor. My heart beat a million miles an hour. I hadn’t fallen like that in years, not at someone else’s call. Not without being able to fight back.
He stared down at me, shield impressive, like mirrored glass. “You are in no condition to fight me, and we both know it. I will be back, and you’d better be ready to talk. Or I will do far worse than you imagine.”
I pulled myself to a sitting position, the headache settling in with terrible nausea, and watched as he walked away. Anger was like a coal in my belly. But there beside it, like an unwelcome houseguest, a bloom of fear that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I pushed at it.
At least he hadn’t seen Jacob.
CHAPTER 13
Thursday morning, bright and early, I was relieved to be back at work. Back to where, for now at least, Stone couldn’t ambush me, and I could do some good, even with a reaction-headache the size of Texas from last night’s occurrences and this morning’s too-difficult exercises. Mindspace was steady, though, if painful; I was getting stronger over time. If I’d stop pushing it, if I’d let it be, I’d probably be healed up in a few weeks.
I needed to stick to crosswords and stretching for a while.
I reported to the conference room. Cherabino had told Michael to send all the information about the case to Piccanonni, the state-level Georgia Bureau of Investigation profiler who’d helped us out previously. Now it was time for the woman to call us back.
Michael was there when I arrived. I sat a respectable distance from him, still within arm’s reach of Cherabino, but I gestured to the coffee I’d brought him. Olive branch bringer, that was me.
“Am I early?”
“She’s running late, apparently.” Cherabino was blocking me, visualizing a brick wall between us so starkly I could actually see the bricks. “Are you okay?” she asked, in a tone designed not to travel the length of the table to Michael.
I ignored the overture. “Did she get any information for us?”
She looked down at the table, then back at me. She wanted to push it. I could feel how much she wanted to push it, but she was a cop. A cop who was surrounded with guys in the middle of some really horrible emotional stuff. She knew the code.
“Did Michael’s research help?”
“This is the first I’ve heard from her in days. You know what I know.” She paused. “The GBI is doing us a favor. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”
I pulled a few sheets from the stack of recycled fiber paper in the small supply hutch in the corner. We were in the smaller of the two conference rooms, this one called Dupin after some fictional detective I’d never heard of. Other than the hutch and the ridiculously large table and chairs, there wasn’t room for anything else in the room but walls. The walls themselves were dotted with hundreds of tiny holes, the occasional pushpin still sticking to a scrap of paper. This wasn’t the conference room for guests.
The phone in the center of the table started ringing right when I sat down. I creased the paper as Cherabino answered, on speaker.
“Cherabino. Nice to hear from you,” the phone said in a precise soprano. “Thank you for waiting. You’ve stumbled across one of the big question marks in our department, and I had to go up the chain of command to get clearance for the details.” What I remembered about Piccanonni from our one in-person meeting was her overly ordered mind, every thought organized, every idea tagged and arranged in precise cubbies. As for physical appearance, she wasn’t young, she didn’t wear a lot of makeup, and she wasn’t abnormally thin or fat or tall or short. Other details got lost in the precision of that mind.
“How so?” Michael asked.
“Who is this?”
“Officer Michael Hwang. I’m new to Homicide.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Hwang. To answer your question, in my experience there are two categories of criminals. The messy, splashy ones who operate out of emotion, and the quieter, thinking kind who plan things. What I think you have on your hands is a criminal who looks like the former but in actuality seems to be of the second kind.”
I finished folding a paper crane and perched it on top of a pen. Then I went to work on the next figure, folding the piece of paper in half, finger putting pressure down the crease in a long, solid line.
Cherabino frowned at the phone. “You’ll have to be more specific. What exactly are we dealing with?”
A long sigh came through. “A professional. A good professional, because he’s been operating in the state for several years, we believe, without getting caught. We believe he’s the hand behind a number of the political killings in Fulton County—you remember the rash of deaths attached to the retail contract awards for the Hartsfield-Jackson Air and Space Port—and also some private work, meaning rich men’s enemies who appeared dead at convenient times. We believe, based on some of the evidence at the splashier scenes, that he has some kind of advanced military training. That, and his propensity to strangle a statistically interesting percentage of victims, led our office to tag him the Python. It’s a fanciful name, but it’s the only one we have. Thus far, he’s covered his tracks.”
Cherabino leaned forward. “How likely do you think this guy is to have done our killing? We still have a missing husband of the victim we’re having trouble tracking, a viable suspect.” From her direction came the vague knowledge that there’s a bias in consults toward the splashier answer. Still, Piccanonni had info she didn’t. . . .
Wait, where did the bricks go? A rush of surprise passed between us, and then suddenly she put up the wall again.
I went back to folding paper.
Piccanonni continued, oblivious. “Obviously you’ll need to track down all the viable leads. But in my opinion, this one has the mark of this particular professional. The lack of struggle, in particular, without any drugs or restraints, is an odd detail—and one that has been popping up only in the last few months. The partial response from your last victim is indicative of a partial success from his method, in my estimation. We have yet to determine cause of the trend. We can, however, confirm fifteen killings in the area that match the pattern of strangulation with a sharper-than-expected cord, from behind. I’ve identified these killings as his handiwork.”
“Fifteen?” I murmured, and then had to introduce myself when she heard the new voice. “Where are these fifteen killings?” I finished up the second crane and settled it next to the first.
“Many of them are associated with Fiske’s empire and his dealings with rival criminal organizations,” Piccanonni returned. “While Fiske of course is likely to employ multiple professionals of this nature, the Python for some reason is his preferred one. It’s odd that he left the woman in the house and you were able to recover a portion of the cord. Unless there’s an interruption or a specific order from Fiske, the Python normally hides his tracks better than this. If this was a higher-profile victim, I’d venture to say the body was left as a message. But you say she has no connection to large-scale criminal activities.”
“Um,” I started, then dived in before I could change my mind. “What’s his pattern? Would he be likely to taunt his victims before he kills them?”
“What kind of message, would you say?” Michael asked, and then looked over at me and mouthed, Sorry.
“How certain are you that this guy is connected to Fiske?” Cherabino asked. “I’ve been assisting with that case for eighteen months now, and no one is connecting him to any Python.”
“One question at a time please. The Python’s typical pattern is to strike unannounced, in a situation in which the victim is not expecting attack. The message in this case, I believe, is to potential investigators, a statement of power over the victim. As for Fiske, it’s a loose association at best—but it’s there.”
Cherabino was sil
ent for a long moment. “Can we go after him?”
“He killed a woman. Of course we go after him. He’s just a killer like any other.”
“And the Net is a collection of bits and bytes,” Piccanonni replied. “Nothing to do with superviruses, Tech that kills you, or death by computer.”
Everyone went silent at that. The world hadn’t lost millions in the Tech Wars sixty years ago just to make the same mistakes again. That’s why we had Quarantine. That’s why computers were kept under lock and key and even Cherabino had to go through a quarterly deep-background check just to have one.
“It’s a good question. Assuming we are correct and he’s tied to Fiske’s operation closely, taking him down might flag Fiske’s attention before the larger task force is ready to move. That would be dangerous, for everyone concerned.”
“So we should proceed with caution and a lot of questions. You’ve been coordinating with the whole group. How likely do you think this is a professional hit from Fiske himself?” Cherabino was frowning, mind streaming possibilities and odds. Fiske isn’t Nice People, her mind flashed. And her sensei said not-nice people should be watched, closely, so you’d see their moves in advance.
I started folding a frog.
Michael shifted. “We sent you over all that information. . . .”
“It’s odd, if it’s him. We know a great deal about Fiske and a lot about how he operates, both within and outside his organization. If you get in the way, he’ll order a hit. He’ll eliminate the family too, to make a point, if he needs to, but it’s not his standard operating procedure. Fiske is more direct. The death of a woman, messy and left for anyone to find, plus the disappearance of the husband . . . it’s odd. It doesn’t line up with how he has done business in the past.”
“If you have so much proof of this guy’s murder tactics,” I said, “why haven’t you arrested him yet?”
Cherabino’s mind was suddenly, overwhelmingly full of information, and there was a silence on the end of the phone.
