He stared into the camera. Janeiro stared back, her mouth agape.
“You’re not on Mars...”
“Scotty, I—”
The screen went black.
“Janeiro!” Coe cried to the monitor. “Janeiro!”
He tried frantically to dial her back up. The building continued to sway. Each time he dialed the Mars number, an automated message advised it was no longer in service.
Seven.
Rainmaker. It’s what we do. It’s in our name. We are the world leader in the production of rain. Rainmaker. That’s us. We’re the “water people”...
He hammered on the door. A sleepy Miss Hunter opened it a crack, peeked out.
“Mr. Coe?”
“Can you access the databases from home?” he asked.
“I, I—”
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“W-why, yes...” She closed the door, unlatched the chain and allowed him to enter.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late, but this is important. It can’t wait until morning.”
She was once again dressed in her robe. Her legs and feet were bare. “Would you like some tea?”
Ignoring her, he said, “I need intel on someone. A woman. Janeiro Martinez. Last known address: Mars.”
“Mars?”
“I believe she’s here in the city,” he said.
Coe followed Miss Hunter to her personal CRT. She sat down at her desk, keyed in her passwords. “Janeiro—”
“Martinez. Age twenty-eight. At least that’s the age she gave me.” He doubted any part of her story was true now.
“Here’s one,” she said, quickly. “Martinez, Janeiro. Cydonia, Mars—”
“That’s her,” he said.
“It’s not. She was three days old.”
“Was?”
“She’s dead. Died seven years ago.”
“What’s her UID?”
Miss Hunter told him. It was the same UID that had initially led him to Janeiro Martinez instead of Albert Bock of Winnipeg, Alberta.
“I’ve been set up,” he said. “There were no data entry mistakes. There were no mistakes—”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Coe.”
“There was a frame,” he said. “I walked right in and took the bait. It’s actually quite brilliant.”
“What does this mean? Are you in some kind of trouble, Mr. Coe?”
“What do you know about telecommunications relays?” he asked. “Specifically, involving Mars numbers?”
“I don’t have any experience with them—”
He was talking fast now, he realized that. His mind was jumping from idea-to-idea. Things, synapses, were firing, connecting. Janeiro Martinez—or rather the woman portraying Janeiro Martinez—had stolen the UID, and essentially, the identity, of the real, but dead, Janeiro Martinez. It was an old trick and quite easy. Anyone could accomplish it, anyone who could take a walk through a cemetery or peruse the obituaries. A baby doesn’t establish credit or any paper trail in three days. Just a name and a UID.
“Who is she?” Miss Hunter asked.
“Just find her.” He gave her the Mars number that had been disconnected. “I think it’s a relay.”
“But—”
“It’s very important that I find her,” he said. “I can’t tell you anything else right now.”
“I’m going to need some time,” she said.
The kettle whistle sounded. She stood and walked to the kitchen. Coe watched her make tea. He didn’t recall the decision, the fifteen feet between the living room and the kitchen, the standing behind her, the kissing her ear, her neck. He was aware of his hands loosening the sash that held close her robe, and of it opening, and of the freckles on her bare shoulders as the robe slipped to the floor.
She trembled as he cupped her breasts in his hands. He felt her nipples grow hard. Then she turned and pressed her mouth into his. He was aware of her hands undoing his belt, his pants. He stepped out of them, allowed her to slip his shirt off over his head. And then they were together and she was soft and warm and they stumbled through the kitchen and an aftershock and they tumbled into her bed and made love.
And he mostly made love to her—to Ms. Hunter—but he still couldn’t quite shake the notion of Janeiro and her olive skin, and he secretly wondered, as he entered Ms. Hunter, what it would have felt like to be entering Janeiro for the first time.
After they had made love, and Ms. Hunter was asleep with her head resting upon Coe’s bare chest, he thought some more of Janeiro. Echoes of conversations, snippets of dialogue—her grin—replayed in his mind. He’d trusted her; but she was a spider, or rather, the bait. There wasn’t anyone to trust now.
As if sensing his troubled mind, Ms. Hunter awoke and glanced sleepily at him. She touched his lips lightly with the tips of her fingers and then fell back to sleep.
In the morning, they rode the train in together to work, with Coe exiting at the stop before the building so they would not be seen together. All day, he smelled Miss Hunter on him—his fingers, his clothes, and his flesh.
He worked on the Bruges file. It made no sense to him. It was not named after a place, but rather a person: Vincent Bruges, an investment banker that one day turned up missing. There was no evidence of foul play or any sinister motive behind his disappearance. From all appearances, it seemed as though Bruges had just one day picked up and left without telling anyone—his employer, his wife, his mother—or their friends. A life insurance policy for $1M had been cashed in in the days leading up to his disappearance; debts—including a car payment and mortgage—had been paid off. A flight in his name to Argentina (Buenos Aires) with one connection at Dallas-Fort Worth had been booked one month in advance of the disappearance with departure scheduled for the very morning that Bruges kissed his wife and children good-bye and then failed to report to his office. What was Quantum’s interest in Bruges? It wasn’t clear. There were no instructions provided with the assignment of the file. Coe carefully read and reread the prior auditor’s notes, they being the only thing upon which to base his own investigation. There were telephone calls to the Bruges’s residence, multiple interviews with Mrs. Bruges, report cards and assessments from the Bruges children’s school, hours of surveillance on the Bruges house out in suburban Burdick—none of it fruitful. What he was to do with the file, he did not know.
He phoned Mrs. Bruges. Her first name was Loretta. “Are you the new caseworker?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said after a pause.
“So you’re the one that’s going to find Vinny now?”
“What do you think happened to him, Mrs. Bruges?”
“You have the file, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s in front of you?”
He hesitated and looked down at the file open and spread across his desk. “Yes.”
“And it has the notes from all of the prior caseworkers, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you wasting my time then?”
“I want to know why I should find him, Mrs. Bruges.”
She laughed. “Why you should find him? I don’t know. Maybe so you don’t have to pay out on the life insurance policy that you’ve done a good job of not paying, so far.”
“I’m not the insurance company—”
He was struck by an odd revelation—one that should have admittedly come much, much sooner in his career. He did not know exactly what The Quantum Corporation made or produced or what service they actually provided. Sure, Quantum was a global corporation with divisions in many sectors: finance, real estate, banking, investments, manufacturing, retail, hospitality—but what exactly that meant, was suddenly for the very first time clearly a mystery.
“We’re not the insurance company,” he said again, but not sounding so certa
in of himself.
“Well,” she said. “Whoever you are, or wherever you’re from—and whatever interest you have in Vinny; my theory on what happened to my husband has not changed in the four years since he’s gone missing. Put your reading glasses on and curl up with the file. Good-bye—”
“Wait.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Are you there?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m not sure what our interest is in your husband...and I’m unsure why I was asked to find him...”
“Go on.”
“...I thought by speaking to you, that might become clear.”
“Christ,” she said. “What if you mean my Vinny harm?”
“Harm? But—and forgive me for saying this—you seemed to indicate a moment ago that you believed he was dead.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You accused me of being with the insurance company that holds the policy on Mr. Bruges’s life, and of holding up the death benefit.”
“How’s a widow to live?”
“A widow...only if Mr. Bruges is, in fact, dead.”
“You accuse me of killing him?”
“I don’t.”
“I pray every night he’s okay.”
“Does that imply that you believe he’s still alive?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said.
“What do you believe?” he asked.
“I believe there’s too many goddamned companies anymore. I can’t keep any of you straight.”
“Do you believe your husband’s alive?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“Not after nearly five years.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“It’s in your file.”
“How can you be sure?”
She laughed again. “Because a million goddamned companies have a file on him. When he disappeared, I talked to everyone and anyone who would listen. I repeated the story so often I got sick of hearing it. I should have just saved my breath for the all the good it did me.”
“Why would a multi-billion dollar corporation be interested in your husband?”
“I don’t know...”
“What was he involved in?”
“He was a good man...a good husband...”
“What did he do?”
“Do?”
“For a living?”
“A professor,” she said. “At City College.”
“Professor of what?”
“It should be right there in the file...right under your nose...”
“I’d like to hear it from you, Ms. Bruges,” he said. “I want to know Vinny Bruges, the person—”
”Dr. Bruges,” she said. “PhD with an MS in Molecular Biology.”
“He was an intelligent man—”
“Is,” she corrected. “Or was. I don’t know. My feelings run hot and cold. Some days I feel like I could turn a corner or open the front door and find him standing there; at other times, it feels like he never existed at all.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Bruges.”
“Every time someone new picks up the case, I think, ‘Maybe this will be the man who finds Vinny...this will be the man that finds out the truth about what happened. Just the other day, a man from Steele called—”
“Steele?”
“Caseworker like you—they call themselves monitors there—but I know you’re all skip tracers, private eyes. All of these corporate sleuths on the case and not one of you have the damnedest clue what happened to Vinny.”
“What did you tell the Steele...”
“Monitor? Same thing I’m tell you. He’s still missing.”
“Which brings me back to who would have a reason to kidnap your husband or do him harm?”
She sighed. “Do you want to know how we met? Lockport College. He was the young chemistry professor. Me? I was a grad student—a pretty promising one. I enrolled in his class...He didn’t do or say anything inappropriate. He wasn’t like that. If I didn’t make the first move—and I waited until I was no longer a student of his—we would have never gotten together.” Her voice seemed more faint, as if it were traveling great distances, transmitting from the past. “He’s brilliant. He had all kinds of things in development—things only a speculative fiction writer could dream up.”
“Like what?”
“Synthetics—foods, skins—he developed a technology that allowed for grass to grow in Martian soil and in moon dust...given the right conditions—”
She grew suddenly silent.
“Mrs. Bruges?”
“Who did you say you were again?”
“I’m an auditor. I work for Quantum.”
“I don’t think I want to say anymore,” she said.
“But Ms. Bruges—”
“You ask the same questions...all of you. You want to know about his projects, his discoveries and inventions—what he was working on when he disappeared. None of you are interested in finding him.”
“I can’t speak for the others, Ms. Bruges. But I—”
“I must go,” she said and disconnected the phone.
He listened to the silence for a moment, as if there was something more she had said that had been delayed in the void. When he turned he found Ms. Hunter standing there, her small mouth unable to disguise her satisfaction. “I’ve found your Martian girl,” she said.
Eight.
Syngenetics is the world’s largest synthetics company, employing over 270,000 experts in synthetic genesis with one single-minded intent: to perfect human potential. Over the past four decades, Syngenetics was the first to successfully replicate every organ in the human body. As a result, organ donors, waiting lists, and needless loss of life, are things of the past. At Syngenetics, nothing is artificial; it’s real, it’s natural—it’s you. We create an identical copy of your heart, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver, your stomach. Because the organ is made from your own tissue, we have virtually eliminated the risk of rejection. At Syngenetics, we are proud to be the first synthetic genetics corporation endorsed by the Vatican. For the past eleven years, we have been honored to have the Archbishop of Zurich on our board of directors. At Syngenetics, we don’t play God; we are an instrument of God. As of the first of this year, Syngenetics transplants are now covered by 90% of the world’s top healthcare plans...
Ms. Hunter prepared the information in the form of a dossier.
Her name was Susie Blanchard. She was from a little Midwestern town called Brooklyn Falls. Age twenty-seven. Actress. Mostly commercials and bit parts in low-budget horror flicks. She went by the name of Susie Blackwell. She lived in the outskirts of the city, in a moderate priced, third-story condo unit on Lord Bigsby Way. Formerly an industrial site, the area—officially Kempton, though unofficially considered an outlying neighborood of Logantown—was newly gentrified having received a complete facelift by the state. She had never lived on Mars. She relied on relays to give the impression her vid-phone calls were beaming in from the red planet.
“Watch this,” Ms. Hunter said, typing away on her CRT.
Coe watched as the title screen of a Quantum training video appeared on her monitor.
There’s Only One...
The Quantum Corporation Presents...
“What Is A Conflict of Interest?”
With her perfectly manicured hand, Ms. Hunter skipped through scenes of various actors portraying fictitious Quantum employees and attorneys, vendors, clients, and assorted Quantum business partners. “Here we go,” she said, stopping when she was 7:37 into the training video.
A familiar face appeared on screen. Her dark hair was shorter, and she was slightly younger, but there was no mistaking it: it was Janeiro—at least the woman he’d known as J
aneiro. She was portraying a customer service specialist known only as Ms. Brown. She was being tempted with symphony tickets by a Quantum client as reward for a successful business transaction.
“Is that her?” Ms. Hunter asked.
“Yes.”
“Why are you interested in her?” she asked, and Coe thought the tone in the way which she asked seemed almost wistful.
“She’s part of it,” he said.
“Part of it? Part of what?”
“Part of you, me, Revis, Quantum—everything,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Coe turned slowly to her. She was lovely—you could make the argument she was perfect. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and run away with her. On screen, the actress formerly known as Janeiro, was being terminated for accepting the tickets—and a vacation from the gracious client.
He grasped her by the shoulders and said, “When this is all over, we should go away.”
“Away?” she asked. “Where? Wait...When what’s all over?”
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “With this corporation...with Quantum. There’s something—I don’t know—nefarious about it. It’s corrupt—”
“You mustn’t say that!” she said, and turned away from him. “If they hear you say that, they’ll—”
“If who hears me say that?”
“You mustn’t say.”
Her back was to him. She was facing the blue cloth of the cubicle wall. He placed his hand on her shoulder.
“Not here,” she said. “Not so close...not here.”
He removed his hand from her shoulder and said, “Do you have the street address for Susie Blanchard?”
She nodded toward a slip of paper on her desk. He picked it up, folded it, and placed it inside his suit coat. Ms. Hunter did not move.
He turned and walked away.
Coe signed out a hovercar. It was remarkably easy to use; except for takeoff and landing, it handled just like a car, with an accelerator and brake, a steering wheel, turn signals. He parked it atop the hoverpad on the rooftop to Susie Blanchard’s condominium.
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