The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  The last set of papers I’d read on Limbic Forestall, cheerfully termed What Was Under Mata Hari’s Coconuts, posited that many of the double and triple agents The Web had produced started down their paths due to crude or accidental Limbic Forestall. Under controlled conditions, and with a trained interrogator (read that torturer), immediate and permanent rewiring might be possible. The Director was playing for all the brass tacks. The Ring could own me outright. The question was, did I want them to think I was susceptible? They’d reveal more if they thought I was going down the path, the higher reward eliciting higher risk behaviors from them and thus, give me whatever Pina had sent me to learn.

  I let my eyes goggle a little. “Sweet Jesus, yes. I loooove this place.” Notably, no one else was in my field of view and no one spoke. They’d done this before, potentially yesterday with me. To stay sane and focused, I had decided to work on the assumption that I’d yet to reveal anything of material nature or else why keep up the interrogation?

  “When did Hans give you the disarming codes for the bomb?” Bingo. They had some lingering problems with the warhead. Check.

  “If I tell you, I want twooooo buttons.”

  She smiled and rolled her hips while standing. Definitely a gymnast or judoka. “Now don’t be greedy, one button for one answer. When did Hans give you the disarming codes for the bomb?” The same question in the same tone word for word. That told me something if I could parse it.

  “Well now, red vixen like Nixon. I do not believe he had codes. None not no never nope nope nope. Rhymes with soap you know.”

  She frowned. “You disarmed the bomb. How?”

  I waggled a finger. The wrist restraints were a touch looser. “Button button or no mo’ mutton!’ When she didn’t immediately reply, I started to sing it like a seven year-old. My monitors beeped. Something in my memory had changed the rhythm.

  She popped the button, revealing something not quite a camisole, not a bra. It was sea foam green with lace and underwire that covered her stomach and sides. “Okay, you got me. So, Spetz. How did you deactivate the bomb?”

  I stared at her and then my toes. “That’s a very nice green on you.” She flushed imperceptibly. Ah. Score one for the mysterious M. Molly Pitcher wanted, nay needed, to feel special too. The camisole thing was a gateway to some private life. Noted.

  “How did you deactivate the bomb?” Same question, same words, same tone. A second time. She had done this with me a bunch of times and had not gotten much satisfaction. They thought I was playing with them somehow. They felt I knew.

  “Pushed some buttons, you know, button button show me your sexy bits. I think you’d look amazing naked.” She turned slightly and I saw for a flash of a second that she would like me to see her naked. I looked down at my own body and realized that I had a small towel draped over the groin but otherwise was au natural. They’d cleaned me up well and from what I could see, the body I owned appeared to be enticing. That bore consideration at a later time. One of my beepers started going faster.

  “He’s got more alpha waves.” The director nodded.

  “Tell me about the buttons, Spetz.” She leaned forward. Her right ribcage had a small dimple. I watched her breathe a few times. Likely scar tissue from a major wound. Gunshot perhaps?

  “I knooooooow you owe me another button baby. Ooh baby baby, sexy baby. Sexy lady. Sexy times.” My eyes closed and I started to loll my head.

  The familiar toe pinch, and when I opened my eyes, she had the blouse half undone. Her gun hung slightly in the open. From the butt I could identify it as a Sig Sauer P250. She wanted a lot of stopping power and liked European firearms. From the extended version of the sea foam lingerie, I could see she wore a teddy, the kind that strapped under the underwear. The scar had to be an old bullet wound, and from the mass of the tissue, it had struck the rib. Major wound, life threatening, and yet she was still very lithe. More importantly, she had very close to perfect bilateral symmetry. That meant the Director would be ambidextrous and trained consistently using both sides of her body for combat.

  “Tell me about the buttons, Spetz.”

  “The ones that turned off the big bang boom bombo rombo smack that ass, wow. You really have great abs huh?”

  She smiled and I could tell it was getting under her skin. “Yes. Yes I do.” Rightfully proud. Check. She felt seen and heard. “Yes, the ones that deactivated the main sequence fission bomb.”

  Holy crap. Hans had rigged the main body of the device to detonate independently. Yet it had not. Pina had sent me to find out why. Maybe. Or knew why and sent me to find the person who did it. That was more likely.

  “Heart rate rising, ma’am.” This was a squeaky voice from the corner. Someone shushed him and the Director gave a quick nod of acknowledgement.

  “Tell me about how you deactivated the main sequence, Spetz.”

  “More buttons my sweet petite goddess. Or none for you. Please, sir, may I have some more. Never before has a boy asked for more…” I sang two verses from the Oliver! song before she yanked my toe and gave me my first view of her hips. The blouse had two buttons left.

  “Ooooookay now, that’s amazing. You look amaaaaaazing. Too bad I can’t grope you. Is that on the menu?”

  She winked at me. “Maybe later, darling.” I bit the inside of my cheek and one of the machines blipped. Which made her smile and that little hint of a blush returned. “Tell me about how you deactivated the main sequence, Spetz.”

  “Because you didn’t find the phone, right?”

  “Yes, exactly. We didn’t find the phone.” Right. I cursed Pina for being a horrible awful genius. Darcy would have been watching my every move, hacking every electromagnetic signal in and out of the region. Anonymous had left her a trail of bread crumbs and she’d hopefully been paranoid enough to blanket the area around the Mandarin regardless. It explained why Hans had stayed in the back of the van; facial recognition software can do wonders. Someone had turned off the bomb. Hans, that clever bastard, had an accomplice. One who didn’t want to die for the cause. One that I now had to assume was within the unimpeachably neutral Culper Ring.

  “I ate the phone. Like I’d eat you baby.”

  She smiled and I could tell she was engaged, wanting to hear me compliment her. “You did not eat the phone, Spetz. But you did put it somewhere.”

  I laughed, potentially hysterically. I wasn’t immune to the drugs, just asymptomatic and much harder to push. “More buttons, more delicate flesh or nope nipple nipple. Mmmmm.” I made the face Sonia used to make when Olga served her split pea soup. Kid liked it more than ice cream. Two machines beeped and I closed my eyes.

  When the toe pinch came, she had taken the whole blouse off and come closer still. “Where did you put the phone Spetz?”

  “If I tell you, do I get the skirt too?” That brought her up short. She had the room rapt. I could hear the breathing behind me. Certainly someone was watching from a two way mirror. I had lain down a major gauntlet. But it would require her to make a sacrifice for me, to strip before her peers and subordinates. What she did next would reveal much.

  “You can have the skirt if you tell me. Where did you put the phone, Spetz?”

  “And then the panties? I bet you like to shave it in little shapes. I like giraffes. Do you think you could shave a giraffe into a woman’s you know, delicates?” We had begun to really dance. Wherever she went with what I asked, it now told me important things about her and the Ring.

  “Delicates? Spetz you want to see me naked but you can’t call it by its name?” Checkmate. She had a profiler but not one who knew me well. They needed more data on me, more psychological insight. The week on drugs had not cracked me open. She was fishing for my psyche.

  “See what?”

  “My delicates, Spetz, you wanted to see them.” She looked behind me and someone jabbed a needle into my back. Not via an IV, directly into my system. Likely into a vein near the neck.

  “Oh! You want to show me your deli
cates. Woooooow. You’re so gorgeous. Like a giraffe. Firaffe. Maf maf maf. Do the carpets match the drapes?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” The husk in her voice told me something different. That, despite herself, she did want me to know.

  “Yes, please.” I felt the wave of nausea roll into me and all my limbs felt heavier. They had drugged me heavily. My tongue tasted like arsenic and rattlesnakes. All the monitors beeped at once. I felt my world fading.

  “Where did you put the phone, Spetz?”

  I could feel the outside world, remembered all the facts, but whatever they had given me delivered a cool, almost sociopathic detachment from any kind of feeling or concern. I let it ride me and did not fight the liquid in my bones nor the strange pounding behind my eyes.

  “Where did you put the phone, Spetz?”

  “Tell me what number it stopped on and I’ll tell you where the phone is.” I let my voice be a flat stretch of pavement. Not much of a stretch given that gravity was at five times my weight and the air a burning mist.

  Perhaps she paused a while. One of the attendants whispered, “He’s still technically awake. Alpha now low, Beta high, heart rate at near peak.” It sounded like someone shouting in the mountains.

  Another voice found me, a disembodied voice that came from inside my skull. I heard a strong woman, as if Nadya and Pina and Darcy had merged into one. She spoke to me in my mother’s Ukrainian. “How interesting that you spend so much time with this stranger. And with Hans, it was all over in minutes.”

  I dared not answer her. The room might hear. Translators might record me. I had been trained, hardened against this. The voice knew this and did not argue. She merely passed judgment. “Sonia and Olga dead. Arkady dead. Hans and Cassandra dead.”

  Molly Pitcher’s voice came back, a blaze of echoes and distortions. I followed it back to the white room and the cold air. “We stopped at nine seconds. Now where is the phone? Where did you put the phone, Spetz?”

  The Ukrainian woman whispered into my ear: “Will you get her killed too? Everywhere you go, you bring death.”

  “I dropped it. Somewhere in Newbury street. There wasn’t much time.”

  “No, Spetz. You were inside the building for almost four minutes. You deactivated it from inside the salon. Where did you put the phone, Spetz?”

  I coughed and lolled my tongue and bit my cheek to ground myself. “Wall loll small ball. Yummy tummy baby. You promised me the skirt. I answered. Skirt skirt skirt.”

  She laughed and it didn’t hurt as much to hear. The drug was being countered by my bugs. Taken down progressive notches even as it spiked my brain. The Ukrainian woman had left me. The chills began and gravity lowered to twice normal. “You didn’t tell me.”

  I did my best coy smile, of which I had an apt model. Something pinged on a monitor and I pushed on the memory harder. Two machines rang and Molly looked excited. “You didn’t say I had to tell the truuuuuuuth. Now off with your skirt, Molly Pitcher, and show me your underwear.”

  I heard the glass being tapped but the director stood her ground, her eyes on me both feverish and wary. Deep down, she wanted to take off that skirt, to see me seeing her. But in this room at this time, it was a huge risk, a diminishment of her. Which told me who was watching. That her place in the system remained precarious. She did not have unlimited power and her male masters were Americans, and thus prudes. The skirt came off and she displayed a pair of symmetrical legs, scarred at the left hip with a clear gunshot wound turned scar. From the coloration it had been within the last five years and no earlier than two years ago. She proved my assumption that she was functionally ambidextrous. Her whole body was even in muscle size and tone. She also had a very even tan, down to her feet.

  The panties themselves were red silk affairs, barely visible under the teddy. In the room someone gasped and a door opened, footsteps came in, a yelp and the offender was dragged or escorted out without ceremony. The Director had a great figure. She also had a small tattoo on her right hip, a helix of sorts. The mark of the White Cult. The marvelous drug coalesced all my assumptions and surmises into a coherent image. I knew where I was finally and what had happened. I knew who had killed my family.

  The nagging problem with this whole civil war had been logistics. The Web has been a stratified and hard to navigate place since the days of Sargon. Intentionally so. Conflicts like the last month’s range war destroy the tenuous filaments of illusion, influence, and control needed to allow a select few to rule their brethren. So how did Zeus manage to betray his own genius level leaders of Section 22? While Wickham did the same with Pina and Bernard? Astonishing. Unthinkable. The system could not support such treachery precisely because the gulf between the entities had been intentionally widened and covered in spiritual razor wire.

  Zeus and Wickham had to be introduced, managed, nurtured into rebellion. They needed a trusted go between. The Culper Ring must have branched out via its clandestine operations to supply couriers or brokers of some sort. It was the logical extension of their inherent value. They’d be truly neutral parties, trusted and vetted, able to convey information and goods across any national, cultural, or political line without fear of being compromised.

  The Director had gone a different route, infiltrating Zeus’s cult and using her wiles to get close to its secrets. Until some disaster had hauled her unceremoniously back for Uruguay before her time. Hence the perfect tan. The bomb had not exploded because someone within her organization had been playing the whole Web for a fool. Someone had taken Wickham and Zeus and used them to drive the world to its knees. Then armed the Russians too. Where had all those new weapons come from after all?

  Someone had been working with Hans all along. They knew his plans, knew his codes, had helped set the world on fire, and then helped him sideline Zeus long enough to spring the final trap. That someone had leaked the flight information to Darcy, who’d dropped Zeus from the sky. But then miraculously survived. Which meant that Darcy’s systems also had been compromised or that Oslo’s organization had a double agent outside Wickham.

  Either there existed a cabal well of supremely advanced agents well beyond our collective reach, or a lone gunman had found a way to take the system down from within. Or Hans had planned it this way and, at the last moment, his collaborator had chosen life instead of death. Because Roger had not been the first of his plants. Could not have been. There would have had to have been extensive tests and a system in place to support him.

  Ergo, the replacement had to be someone who’d not yet made a mistake but would. Someone whose information had some kind of limits but whose overall mobility and power within the Culper Ring proved extensive. But they had made a mistake, a single stupid blunder. They had killed my family.

  Certainly Zeus requested it, and Hans would have been pleased to ensure they died. All of Section 22 would have rejoiced when I felt the burn, but my profiler had made the call. The Culper Ring lacked the resources of The Syndicate. It would not have an agent solely assigned to me as Section 22 had until she rebelled. They would have someone who played a number of key roles: courier, hacker, operative, profiler. A black ops professional who owned my dossier among a dozen other responsibilities.

  I knew some of the Ring’s history. They never promoted except from within after years of serious vetting; they almost never made personnel mistakes and loyalty meant more to the Ring than competence; but only just barely. No one could have replaced that line officer without it being noted. Instead, years ago, Hans had ripped the face and hands off one of the later Generations and transformed them into a Culper Ring junior commando. Who then distinguished himself with exemplary courage and loyalty; who became the perfect replacement for the profiler who would have met with a mysterious accident a couple of years ago. In time, trust bloomed and the exemplary man—it could not be a woman given the sexism I’d witnessed—had evolved into a top flight operative, trusted to travel the world on special assignment. The ultimate mole.


  He blew my profile because he was Section 22 and made the wrong assumptions about me. He must have been certain that their deaths would spiral me into a crushing depression. Instead of catatonia and isolation, I’d become reckless and deranged, thwarting Section 22’s well-built plans of a decade or two. So he kept mucking around, tweaking operations, trying to recover until Hans had been left with few reasonable options. So he had gone ahead with the unreasonable ones.

  Stupid bastard. This was what I looked like with crushing depression. I heard my body laughing and laughing. Hands held me down and the room erupted into a bit of panic.

  As each of my generation reached puberty, Cassandra had taken us aside and surgically altered our jaws, moving a nerve cluster so that when we bit down in a certain place with a certain level of pressure, we seized. Over time, and with sufficient punishments, we learned to ride the seizure and control our movements; to pickpocket keys and paperclips; to deliver a killing blow; to whisper a secret. I bit down on that spot and kept seizing until I had collected some keys, some kind of badge, and a spent needle, as well as forced them to loosen the strap on my right arms and hand. Then I stopped and listened.

  “We overdosed him…”

  “He’s stopped seizing, but the brain waves are erratic…”

  “Damn, Sasha, those are some panties…”