by Ani Fox
I had an hour so I made a call. Her phone had only one number on autodial. I pushed the button and waited. On the third ring a cultured German voice answered, a baritone of masculinity that made my stomach drop: Hans. “Greetings.”
“Hans, I missed you.” I went with the German. In my youth we had all been bilingually fluent in German and Russian, my generation also knew Ukrainian from our time there.
“You will address me as Father.” Right. So Hans knew my voice just as I so dearly knew his.
“Come here and make me say it.” It was a childish comment and we both knew it, but it also opened the conversation, drove us to a particular fulcrum from which to begin the verbal combat. With Hans and me there could be no other outcome.
“And if I did, would you come home to us son?” By now his people would have triangulated the call. They’d know I was in Toronto, near the intelligence nexus. Calls to Gen 16 would follow. Unanswered calls and with them, notes and hand signals would start to pass. I was about to have a rare unscripted moment with the progenitor of our present civil war. In an ironic twist, they might not be able to identify my phone. Cassandra had a deep paranoid streak—correction, used to have—that included shielding communications, even from Hans.
“Interesting question. The last time we spoke you tried to cave my skull in using a sledgehammer.”
“A misunderstanding.” There had been no misunderstanding. He’d ordered me tied down, had six men then hold me on top of the straps, and had approached with a three kilo sledge. On a side note, using your body armor as the base of a directional explosive works well, especially when your shrapnel happens to be mix of synthetic capsaicin and Agent 15. Ribs heal, scars fade, but delightful memories are forever.
“Now, Hans, we’ve talked about this. You were a bad parent and a worse employer.”
The Sigh. Every child, even rogue operatives with complex evil villain fathers know The Sigh. “We made you a god. Compared to the puny meat sacks who are walking by you, you are one of the Aesir.”
“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.”
He coughed. “You quote Goethe to me? Impudent wretch, I could dine on your nameless grave” For Hans that was being polite, severely polite in truth.
“Sure. Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future. Know that one?”
He was silent. I heard a whisper. “What have you done? Wolfie, what have you wrought?” Ahh, the pet names. Little wolf. Wolfie. Mr. Big Bad Wolf. Sonofabitch had injected me with wolf mitochondria one season when he and Cassandra were bored. When I didn’t die they branched out to a few brothers. Killed every last one of them.
“I huffed and I puffed, Hans, but to business, yes?” They had told him that Gen 16 had gone silent, they might even be watching the nightly news. A secondary explosion rocked the block and a huge column of smoke punctuated the sky. My phone rang and I ignored it. No use tipping them off about Cassandra yet.
“Fine. Business. You’ve been a difficult child again.”
‘Do you mean killing your evil clone or refusing to die?”
“Achh. So that bitch didn’t manage it herself.” I could hear the pride in his voice. Admitting that to him might have been a tactical mistake, but with Hans I often took risks. He had so few unguarded moments. “One of my own had to handle it.”
“I like your new recipe.” That brought stony silence. “Come now, Father, you can’t imagine that I’d not see your handiwork and know a work of art when I see it.” Oh that got him. I could feel the inhalation of breath, the much needed, much anticipated moment. I had not called him father in twenty years.
“Prions. They are the future. In nano, certainly.” I hadn’t been in a bio lab in a long while, and my understanding of prions was limited because when we were working on bio-weapons, they simply did not exist except as a theoretical category.
“Enlighten me.” When he stayed silent I calculated and decided to go whole hog, to push as hard as I could and let the chips fall. This was total war. I had committed when I shot Cassandra. He would never forgive me and I had long since forgotten how to forgive anyone. “Please, Father, tell me.”
“Ach, manners at last. Since you ask, my son, prions can travel where the viruses, they cannot. We have changed them, attached a viral capsule, which ensnares the Are En Ay. With some buckyfibers and a little false flagging, we have made a fast agent. The fastest.” The last words were spoken with indefatigable arrogance. I’d seen that agent at work. It moved almost faster than the speed of the bloodstream.
“The prion merges with the bucky shell then?”
“Very precisely so. But the greatness is in the delivery. The broken folds, they fold and fold. Then the body simply obeys its own command.”
Gods, but I understood him. Many years with Hans and Cassandra had taught me much about the involutions of their mind. They spoke in an almost gibberish shorthand, more esoteric mysticism than science, but the science was sound. Horrifically sound.
“Nerve impulses. You’re transferring misinformation to the entire neural storm in one go.”
“Tch. I told Cassandra she was wrong about your intelligence quotient.” Which brought me back to the present. Around me the street swarmed with nervous Canadians, the nearby explosions raising awareness and speeding the pace of the street. The city instinctively braced for the chaos as word passed street by street.
“Thank god you can’t weaponize that. You’d wipe out the globe.”
He laughed softly. “Oh, so clever. Yes. You know I can. More to the point, Wolfie, I can and I will. It requires some tinkering, a few modifications so it’s technically viral. The details would bore you.”
Hans had a superweapon and he had the means to proliferate it. Section 22 was decades ahead of most biological and chemical research. Their version of weaponizing could include a globally triggered response using nanites or a set term of infection, which could be dialed in for hours or weeks. If the underlying package was lethal, they had delivery sorted.
“Unless what, Father? You wouldn’t be bragging to me without a reason. You already know I melted your little kindergarten klatch.” Time to fight.
“Why did you this terrible thing, Wolfie, why?” He had begun to speak older German. I had him emotional.
“You started it.”
“I tried to kill that infernal woman. What is the she-devil to you? She’d eat your family for breakfast.” Hans was probably right on that count. Pina didn’t feel things like normal people. But then neither did Hans or me, or any of us perhaps. I’d looked in her eyes and believed her when she told me she had not wiped out Arkady and Olga.
But Hans was talking about Section 22, playing on the emotional weaknesses he had installed in me, had Cassandra condition into me with drugs and beatings and, when that didn’t take, electric shocks and starvation. Family for Hans was only the ubiquitous “Us.” All else were lesser people.
“You tried to kill her in a building I was standing on. Lots of your people took shots at me.”
“As if I’d let them hurt my favorite.”
“Who’s Zeus?”
“Ach, what. Now you have sibling rivalry?”
“Who’s Zeus, Father? Why does he want me dead?”
The Sigh again, this time directed at someone else. So Zeus had also crossed Hans in some way. Interesting. “Who you should have been, your replacement. He’s superior to you in every way.”
“So what? Bow to Zeus and the virus doesn’t get launched? All we want is peace?”
“They bring me the heads of these unreliable elements, the fag and the witch. Then I do not kill you all, yes. He will run the Last Empire.”
I’d heard that song before on endless replay. The Last Reich, the cleansing of the earth, the final reckoning. Yada, yada. Except Hans had never had undetectable nerve agent before thanks to prions. Then I had a peculiar thought.
&nbs
p; “The virus will kill all of us too. You’ll be murdering your children.”
“No. I will be freeing them, the older ones yes. But you my darling, all your brothers and sisters unto Zeus and his will not just survive, you will be twice the gods as before.” That threw me. The sophistication of a delivery system that our nanomeds could dismantle but which would invade normal immune systems without defense had to be impossibly complex. Or chillingly simple. All he had to do was attach it to the common cold or Herpes simplex and we’d survive.
“So Cassandra came out to Toronto to prep the supplies in the warehouse? The one on Ninth Street with the basement armory?”
Absolute silence reigned for a good forty seconds. “I can make more. I will make more, you impertinent dog.” At last, he was getting angry.
“I think you mean we can make more. Cassandra and I, Father, isn’t that how it’s always been? She’s your everything. Especially when it comes to growing and implanting nanites.” My phone rang again. I ignored it a second time. Underneath the conversation there were more hushed whispers, the rustle of paper. Then a sharp breath. That meant someone had reported.
“Wolfie…”
“Oops. Sorry about that.” We both knew I wasn’t at all sorry.
“All for this woman. All for what, what my son?” Another excellent question. Why help Pina? Certainly I was continuing to keep my word to Nadya and take the fight to Section 22. If he had been my real father, a man worth trusting, what would I have told him? That it didn’t matter anymore. That I was sick of the killing, the games. Or more honestly, that Pina and Bernard at least were equal opportunity monsters. They let women, gays, and brown people into their ruthless cabal. All for liking her? Liking that she made the pain in my head go away?
Be honest, that little voice deep within cried to me: You do this because hating Hans has always been something you resisted and, without incentive to limit your restraint, killing off the whole of the Abschnitt alone can bring you peace.
“I am what you made me.”
His voice took on a cold fury. “When we meet again, I will dose you with so many correctives you will kneel and falter.”
“Not without killing yourself you won’t. Hans Gutlicht loves himself like Kanye loves Kanye.”
“Who?” His media attaché would explain it later and the fact that Kanye West was black would infuriate Hans even further. When I didn’t speak, he followed, “Cassandra will help me. She’s already upgraded me to carry your salvation.”
That meant Hans would contaminate anyone with our genetics, that his nanites contained a new malicious encoding, apparently meant to propagate immunity to the weapon, but Hans and Cassandra would also have added things. For me, it likely meant that any direct contact would be a one way trip. I’d have to kill him the first time out, no exceptions, no mercy, not the slightest moment of hesitation. In turn, Hans would pick somewhere crowded, full of people he’d try to force me to hurt to get to him. Because to Hans, they weren’t people.
Cassandra’s phone buzzed again and I answered. Hans voice rang out: “My beloved, he has escaped us again. Can you take him?” I waited and did nothing but breathe, letting Hans worry for a few moments that Cassandra was hurt, couldn’t speak. What would he reveal?
“Cassie? Darling? I’ve duped the animal into talking. We can track him, kill him finally. Cass, my love, are you there?”
My stomach sunk. After all that theater, he’d revealed nothing. Strategically I stood in total darkness and my life depended upon the light. I had always known he wanted me dead, needed to wipe me from the earth. Something fulminous roared within my throat. “You see, Hans, I’ve been trying to tell you. Cassie kind of lost her head.”
The silence was deafening. “I will destroy you.”
“Hmm, you might. But right now, it’s me Hans, destroying you. Zeus took a few bullets for her but nothing could stop me once I got to shooting. After he fell down, all comatose and broken, well no one was there, Hans. She was alone, facing me and a lot of firepower. So, um, oops. I killed them all. Generation 16, your stupid commandos, your little tower of spies and nerve agent. Gone.”
On the other end of the phone I could hear the old man crying. We’d exhausted everything that needed to be said. I hung up and dropped the phone in the trash. BBW’s hacker phone told me that we’d been on for just under forty minutes. Most of my walk was done. I shut down their phone and walked the last ten minutes in silent fury, my face a pleasant mask to the world.
In that time, I had undergone a transformation of sorts. I started as a tourist in bright clothing. Over the last blocks I had dumped the BBW cryptophone down a storm drain, ditched the sweatshirt and hat, donned an expensive looking cable knit sweater, and redid my look, now with hair gel, eyeglasses, a Helly Hansen sailing windbreaker of austere blue, and a genuine meerschaum pipe, lit and smelling of White Burley and Perique. I arrived at the Yacht Club as a sailor in casual clothes, perhaps going to chip some barnacles or such—there was no hiding the mud on the pants nor the combat style boots. The key to a proper cover is having a story ready. I didn’t have to use it. Everyone who passed me felt that story, felt the man I was pretending to be. Between that and the sweet stink of the pipe tobacco, no one asked questions when I took a motored sloop off a one of the docksides and made my way across Lake Ontario to the United States.
Chapter 9
Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.
I made the trip slow and methodical, keeping warm using some blankets I’d found on the sloop. No use repeating my previous freezing trip along the Atlantic. Once I was in the middle of the lake, I cut the power and went to investigate the boat. Belowdecks, the owner had acquired a large and rather tasteless collection of snacks and liquors, mostly vodka and jerkies of various sorts. A hunter’s magazine and a stylized shooting jacket made up the ensemble. There were no guns and the owner appeared to be a men’s small. I found some tools, a few pornographic magazines, a stash of American money neatly tied in a bundle next to a bag of cocaine, and a very fake driver’s license for a man with a bad haircut and mustache named Pete Rickleston. He even had the inevitable hair part with too much gel. I took the money and some of the vodka, a few of the tools, ate most of the jerky and found a set of socks I could swap out with the wet ones in my boots.
By the time I reached the Rochester shore it was threatening dawn. I put myself on the Genesee River and took the sloop upstream to the University of Rochester. I docked the sloop somewhere hard to see and hopped off, letting the boat drift back down river. The boat had already been wiped for prints and the contraband porn and drugs were easily found by anyone looking. Pete Rickleston was in for a bad week.
Rochester has good bagels and I availed myself of a solid cup of unpretentious coffee, a couple of bagels with cream cheese and a newspaper. The headlines screamed terrorism. Chechen extremists had blown up the Opera House. The Americans had cadged their report from a panicked Reuters stringer who apparently didn’t know the Opera House from where the Canadian Opera performed nor what blown up truly looked like. In all, I went through five different papers all saying the same thing: Americans must stand with Canada against the evil radical Muslim tyranny as well as evil Russian tyranny and evil radical whatever Chechens were tyranny. No one knew what had happened and the media frenzy on televisions and websites pumped 24/7 fear and hate. Pictures of jihadist radicals with blond hair and machine guns plastered the town. One of Hans’s very Teutonic commandos had been wearing a shemagh and that had transformed into the Islamist menace in hours. It helped that he was very handsome, very dead, and that he represented the ultimate enemy within, the radicalized boy next door.
I ate my bagels, watched America slowly freak out, and then had some more coffee. My image never made the news. I’d done some very complex hacking to make sure the local cameras would be scrambled and then been fairly circumspect in my escape route. For now, the powers in play had either given me a free pass or didn’t have access to my image y
et. I knew Pina did and that her people would be pouring over the massive data spike I’d sent them via the BBW’s encrypted systems. That was the whole point of turning on their phone prior to the fight. They knew I was alive, that I’d just killed a major enclave of Section 22 and gotten away afterwards. That I’d killed Cassandra and wiped out most of Gen 16 would not go unnoticed. They’d spend a few hours figuring out how much of their own traffic I’d read and what I knew of their plans. Then Pina would decide if I was friend or foe, or neither perhaps. If she sent people to kill me, she could confidently do so since I’d ditched the phone and they could shut down the password backdoors it afforded me.
I passed the day in Rochester, eating often, keeping warm and acquiring a few items of clothing I might need long term. I swapped socks again since the sloop’s socks were cheaply made and itchy. They matched the bastard’s vodka. The news had settled into a predictable mix of hype, panic, speculation, gore, and competition for ratings. My picture never surfaced and, by dinner time, I had powered through most of the stolen money, eaten enough to help my bugs heal me, and cleaned up my look. I resembled a big goofy professor with a heavy coat and badly knit ski hat. Pipe, glasses, and bad hat plus a slouch and a backpack equals professor. I slept in a local hostel, paying cash and speaking with a bad Swedish accent. In the morning, rumpled and stinking of hostel, I trudged towards the Center for Integrated Research Computing where I flashed my badge (lifted from a professor during yesterday’s lunch) and settled down at a computer terminal normally reserved for programmers.
A self-important man in a bad suit challenged me within minutes. His badge stated he was Nigel Fixman, CIRC Supervisor. He looked like the kind of man who used to be Kowalski but had become Fixman because he thought it made him WASPish. He started out with a proper level of academic arrogance. “And just what do you think you’re doing?”
