by Greg Rucka
The realization had caused him one of the only moments of true panic in his adult life. Zoya could rule him. Understanding this, he understood also that he would always love her, that this would never change, and he had been young enough and brash enough and arrogant enough that he couldn’t stand the thought of her jeopardizing him, compromising him. The only escape from the problem he could conceive was to kill her. This would remove her power, he thought, though not his love, and he had brought about the deaths of so many already that the death of another caused him no pause, at least in the abstract. He followed this thinking so far as to actually plan her death, the where, the when, the how, before he had stopped himself in a fit of self-loathing.
He was planning the death of the woman he loved.
How fucked up was that?
It was so desperately fucked up, he concluded, that he had to alter his thinking. Yes, Zoya could make him vulnerable; yes, Zoya could compel him to act solely for her happiness and not his purpose. But to become someone who would kill her because she had claimed his heart? He was capable of monstrous acts; he knew this because he had done monstrous things, all in service to a vision of the future and the world he sincerely believed was better than today’s.
But to murder the woman he loved? That would make him a monster, and it was a distinction that mattered to him.
So he allowed himself to love her entirely in return, and he forgave himself at once for doing so. With her, he broke every one of his rules, and did so willingly. With her, he communicated directly, and far too often. With her, he lingered. With her, he made choices that put her safety before her usefulness. He broke all his rules for her except one.
He would not visit her. He would not compromise himself, or her, in that way. He would love her from afar and trust that she knew he was true.
It is growing dark when he returns to the hotel, and he idles in the lobby, then heads into Le Muh Bar for a San Pellegrino. He drinks while watching the pattern of guests, their movements, their stillness, and just as he was assured during his walk and at the café, he is again certain that no one is paying him any notice. He retreats to his room, orders a room-service dinner, then plugs in his laptop for recharging. He removes his shoes and socks, flexes his feet against the carpet, contemplates the faint tracks his toes leave in the nap. There is a long list of tasks at hand, and ordering them properly, considering their causes and effects, is an ongoing effort. He sits like this for twenty-seven minutes, rising only at the knock on the door to receive his meal.
He positions the room-service cart carefully in his room, both to avoid blocking the exit and for another reason, too. He opens the wings, rearranges the setting, making it as close to a proper table as he can. Advice from his father, many years ago, that when a man dines alone, that is all the more reason to remain civilized. His eyes stray to his laptop as he starts on the Caprese salad, and he considers reading while he dines. He recognizes this as impatience on his part and resists. He moves on to his entrée of filleted char. He eats slowly, actively forcing himself to wait. When he finishes the meal, he resets the cart and shifts it out of the way, and only then does he take a seat at the desk and open the computer.
The machine is a heavily modified and custom-made laptop housed in the ubiquitous chassis of a relatively new MacBook Pro, similar to the machine that Zoya herself uses, though hers is less sophisticated. Booting the laptop reveals the start-up that anyone would and should expect, culminating at a desktop littered with folders and files named things like TRAVEL EXPENSES_YTD and ITINERARY and NOTES ON SOUTHEAST ASIAN DISTRIBUTION. It all looks very convincing. Beneath this, however, runs a shadow operating system, wrapped in layers of security to prevent unauthorized or accidental access, and it is in these depths that the Architect lives and breathes. These programs fly out into the world and do everything from monitoring his many channels of communication to plotting, booking, and purchasing his randomly generated travel arrangements.
It is in these depths that he decrypts and then assembles the information Brock has passed to him through Zoya. There are two discrete packages, everything that he has hoped for. The first contains a handful of images from a crime scene in Virginia, what remains of a man lying on the asphalt, his upper body savaged to the point of destruction by high-velocity rounds. A sparse scattering of reports, some conflicting, some local law enforcement, some military. Pieces are missing, much as they are with the body in the images—evidence, to the Architect’s eyes, of an attempted cover-up. This makes sense to him, but it makes him suspicious; he would prefer a hard verification, some undeniably positive proof that the dead man is, in fact, Vosil Tohir. The best he can find is a terse after-action report that, even through its militarese, declares that an asset named Heatdish was assassinated during transport by his personal security detail.
It took four days, but Brock has done as asked.
The Architect thinks about Vosil Tohir. It is a pity, he acknowledges, that it came to this, but there was no choice. Loyalty buys only so much, and he knows that Tohir realized quickly there was no escape, nothing the Architect could have done to purchase or steal his freedom. Once Vosil Tohir understood that, he would have also known his life was forfeit. With that, he would have offered everything he knew, everything he had.
How much he gave up before he was silenced the Architect can only guess. He thinks Tohir would have held back, because one never gives away everything if it can possibly be helped. Information was the only currency Vosil Tohir had. He would have shared what he knew carefully, hoping to use his knowledge to buy as much as possible.
With any luck, Tohir died before he could reveal too much.
The Architect lingers over the photographs for a minute longer, then closes the files and turns his attention to the second packet. This is the information he demanded as partial payment for services yet to be rendered, information that, by the laws of the United States of America, is a state secret. Brock has committed treason in passing them to the Architect. This is the truth about the men who unraveled the operation in California, who captured Tohir in Uzbekistan.
The Architect finds the files on their team leader, an Indigo master sergeant named Jonathan “Jad” Bell, particularly interesting.
Master Sergeant Jonathan “Jad” Bell is thirty-nine years old. He was born 18 January, in Portland, Oregon, the only child of Alana and Simon Bell, deceased. He attended Grant High School, ran track, played football. His graduating GPA was 3.8. He left for basic three weeks after graduation, returned home long enough to marry Amy Kirsten Carver, then reported for AIT, followed by Army Airborne School, and subsequently the Ranger Indoctrination Program, all at Fort Benning. Assigned to the Second Ranger Battalion, he proceeded to the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama. A citation in the file from his command sergeant major, Gerard Hennelly, cites distinguished action during Operation Safe Haven and a recommendation that Bell be admitted to Ranger School. Upon graduation, he was promoted to private first class.
A variety of duty assignments follows, with various notes, commendations, recommendations, and promotions. After four years, instead of leaving, Bell extends his service under the BEAR program, retraining as MOS 97B. He attends the Counterintelligence Special Agent’s Course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and is then stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It is as his extension is coming to an end that he is sent to Afghanistan, and shortly thereafter he applies for Delta selection. Accepted, he spends the next several years as a high-level door kicker until he becomes attached to Indigo under his Delta colonel, Daniel Ruiz.
The Architect takes his time reviewing the rest of the service record, the long list of commendations and citations. There is only one reprimand, during his first tour, an Article 15 for “failing to prevent a cold-weather injury,” which resulted in a confinement to barracks for forty-five days and another forty-five days of extra duty.
Curious, the Architect goes digging and learns more. He learns that Bell and Amy Kirsten Carver are
recently divorced. He learns that Jonathan Bell had been offered a full scholarship to the University of Southern California in exchange for his football skills. He discovers that Bell had accepted the offer then subsequently turned it down. The Architect checks the dates and discovers that Bell’s parents died on the same day, the first of January. It is an easy matter to find the story online, reported in the Oregonian, of the MVA that took their life early on New Year’s morning.
The Architect thinks about a seventeen-year-old in his last year of high school, looking at the University of Southern California in the fall. He thinks about a New Year’s phone call to a young man who undoubtedly spent the night celebrating with Amy Kirsten Carver and perhaps others, friends or teammates or both. The only mention of extended family in the file is an uncle, the brother of Bell’s mother, who lives in Alaska.
The Architect thinks of Amy Kirsten Carver, truly in love for the first time in her life, filled with ardor and romance, and of what she must have seen when she looked at her football player, whose life had been turned upside down. That the marriage lasted as long as it did is not surprising; Bell would’ve clung to family like a climber clings to his lead. The birth of their daughter would only have made any thought of separation or divorce that much more difficult.
Considering this, the Architect is certain it was Amy Kirsten Carver-Bell and not Jad Bell who asked for the divorce.
Athena Andrea Bell, their daughter, is sixteen years old. The Architect wonders if the child was planned—if she was an attempt to bolster an already collapsing marriage. He wonders if the fact that the child is deaf has only prolonged the inevitable, if the birth and discovery of her handicap weren’t behind Bell’s change of military occupational specialty, his MOS. Athena Andrea Bell, the Architect quickly learns, attends the Hollyoakes School for the Deaf in Burlington, Vermont. He confirms this online in a four-day-old story from the Burlington Free Press entitled “School Trip Becomes Student Nightmare,” in which Athena Bell is listed among seven students who were visiting WilsonVille when the attack on the park took place. Amy Kirsten Carver-Bell is listed as a volunteer at the school, also present on the trip. She is also, he learns, a licensed real estate agent.
So Bell, his ex-wife, and his daughter had all been in the park that day. He cannot imagine that Bell would have been so negligent as to have welcomed this, and he concludes that the relationship between the two is therefore likely strained, if not adversarial.
It takes only a minute of additional searching to find a residence address for Amy Kirsten Carver-Bell and her daughter in Burlington.
The Architect reads the personnel files twice, committing to memory as much as he can about Bell and his team as well as a Master Sergeant O’Day, who was apparently attached to Bell for the Tashkent capture. He rises from the desk, stretches, moves to the bathroom to wet a washcloth and wipe his face and neck, thinking. He stares past his reflection, allows his thoughts to unmoor and take their own pathways, examining everything he has learned, considering his options.
He has no verification, but he is now certain that Bell or one of his team is responsible for the death of Brock’s associate Lee Jamieson. Jamieson had been the money, and it had been via Jamieson, through Tohir, that the Architect had been paid for the attack in California. It follows that it was Jamieson who led Bell to Tohir, but this is not a tight fit; Jamieson could have learned who Tohir was somehow; the Architect concedes this. But for Bell and his team to have captured Tohir so quickly, so efficiently, must mean there was supplemental intelligence.
The Architect sees his reflection again. Tohir had been compromised, he understands. Someone in the organization spoke out of turn, or someone in his organization is not who he or she pretends to be.
He returns to his laptop. If anyone in Tashkent had survived, he could send an inquiry, but Tashkent is burned, and no one remains. He must, instead, go over Tohir’s reports, beginning with the most recent and then extending back over a year, then another. But knowing what he is looking for now, it doesn’t take him very long at all.
Tohir had a translator brought into the organization almost eighteen months back. He had vetted her appropriately, used her for several jobs before finally bringing her all the way inside. Her background check had been exhaustive—verified and then checked again. He had been sleeping with her, had moved her into his home in Tashkent.
Elisabetta Villanova.
He checks the Tashkent reports again. There was no woman found dead at the house.
In the District of Columbia it is also night, and he imagines Zoya in her home, almost certainly with Brock. He knows that Brock is impatient, nervous, perhaps frightened. Brock, and the men he speaks for, are zealots, and the Architect knows zealotry and patience are uneasy partners at best. Any questions for Brock will have to wait until the Architect speaks with Zoya again, in another six hours or so. But the Architect is certain what the answer will be, just as he is certain that Brock will lie about it. He doesn’t need to ask, because the Architect knows what Brock does at the Pentagon, where he sits in the Joint Special Operations Command.
The Architect doubts that Elisabetta Villanova’s infiltration was done under direct order; the timing doesn’t work, and it is more likely that her appearance beside Tohir was the result of a different operation entirely, begun before Zoya had directed Brock, before Brock had directed Jamieson, before Jamieson had made contact with Tohir. But at some point, Brock must have realized that he had a Bravo-Interdict operator in Vosil Tohir’s bed, and he had kept that knowledge hidden from Zoya and thus from the Architect himself.
This doesn’t, actually, make the Architect upset in the least. If the situation had been reversed, he certainly would’ve done the same thing.
In fact, Brock has done everything that has been asked of him. He has held up his part of the deal, Elisabetta Villanova notwithstanding. He has killed Tohir, he has provided the information the Architect demanded. Now the Architect must do what he has promised.
It takes less than a minute at his laptop to put things into motion.
The contingency that Brock has demanded, while planned to follow along the events in California, is riskier than he imagines. The Architect wonders if Brock understands the scope of what he is asking. But Brock and the men like him, men like the late and unmourned Lee Jamieson, have a specific myopia; they imagine themselves endowed with a global perspective, but they also see themselves as patriots and saviors, and thus they bias their view. They imagine the results of their actions, of the Architect’s actions, in the context of what it will do for and to their country alone.
The Architect abandoned his national identity long ago and believes himself more objective. What happens in the United States affects the world. A second terrorist action on American soil so soon after the first cannot go unanswered. Echoes will wrap the globe, destabilize tenuous peace in the Middle East, require reactions from Moscow and Beijing, set North Korea and Tehran ever further on edge.
Which may be precisely what Brock and the cabal who ride with him desire.
The Architect shuts down his laptop and takes to his bed. He moves the pillows about, conjuring Zoya beside him, before lying down, closing his eyes, and calming his breathing. One pillow he rests in the crook of his right arm, the other between his knees.
It’s a pity about Tohir, he thinks. He’ll have to be replaced.
He kisses the pillow in his arm gently.
“Good night, my love,” he whispers to the goose down.
He is on the train and heading south when he opens the laptop again. He waits as one of his programs maps relay after relay, laying true paths within false ones.
Dorogoy, will you speak to me?
Camera.
She appears in a small window and he smiles, knowing she cannot see it. Not for the first time, he wonders if she will recognize him when they meet again. He has watched her age so slowly these past few years, each time he sees her thinking she looks even more beautiful tha
n before.
You received what I sent?
Yes.
He asks if this satisfies you. He insists you begin at once.
You may tell him it is begun.
It will be this weekend.
He will be pleased. He was agitated when I saw him.
The Architect pauses. He’s positioned himself in his coach so that he has no fear of their words being seen from over his shoulder, but the surprise is such that he checks his position again, just to be certain.
Agitated how?
Compromised?
The wrong word. Alarmed, perhaps? He loves me.
Of course he does.
He thought I had done it.
The Architect stares at the words on the screen for only a second, then types.
What did he say, exactly?
On the screen, he sees the tip of her tongue peek between her lips, sees her close her eyes as she tries to remember. It takes only a moment, and then she is typing quickly.
He arrived and took hold of me. He held me against the wall. “Did you kill him?” he asked. I said I did not know who he meant. “Where were you this morning?” he asked. “Before dawn.” He thought I had done it.
The Architect falls back against his seat, aware of Switzerland passing the window out of the corner of his eye. He sees movement on the monitor, words appearing, Zoya moving closer to the camera. Yet more words appear. He doesn’t read them.
He marvels, for a moment, at how everything can change in an instant. Everything, including his plans. He takes a breath, calming himself, straightens again in his seat. He types, not bothering to read what Zoya has written to him first.
