by RJ Plant
“Only one-third of that assessment is accurate,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said to me. Then to Brinly, “So, this is the company you’ve been keeping lately.”
“You disapprove?” Brinly asked.
“Not at all,” Olwen said, eyeing me again. “Indeed, I very much approve.
“Should I do a little spin?” I asked.
Brinly laughed, but Olwen said, “You should learn to accept compliments with grace.”
Brinly pulled the flash drive from my inside jacket pocket. She looked up at me and winked before handing the drive to Olwen.
“This is it?” Olwen asked.
“It’ll cripple GDI,” Brinly said to her. Then to me, “Olwen was on the original board of directors.”
“Bernard managed to sway most of the rest of the board to his own agenda,” Olwen added, “so I chose to flee before I was made to disappear.” She touched the scar on her face. There was no question in my mind of where it had come from.
She looked at Brinly, her expression pitying, but neither woman said a word of what crossed between them.
“Then you joined Truepenny,” I said.
Olwen smirked. “You could say that.”
“She cofounded Truepenny,” Brinly said.
“Where does this leave us?” I asked Brinly. “I’m not a part of this little feud with GDI. My only concern is destroying Kazic and everyone connected to it.”
“Which includes Bernard,” Olwen said.
“What’s your point?”
“We all want the same thing,” Brinly said. “In a roundabout way and for different reasons.”
“It’s ‘we’ now, is it? I thought you were just a contractor.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” she said.
“Isn’t it always?” I said.
“We need Brinly to take Bernard’s place,” Olwen said. “Once their data is wiped, GDI will be in a temporary state of confusion. Take out Bernard during that time and Brinly will be able to fill the power vacuum left in his place.”
“I’m not hearing this,” I said. Add another player to the board. I felt like the odds of my survival were dwindling. “I thought we came here to get a roller, not discuss a revolution.”
“Well, it’s hardly a revolution,” Olwen said.
“We did come to get a roller,” Brinly said. “It just happened to be a serendipitous opportunity to introduce you to one of Truepenny’s elite.”
“Serendipitous,” I said. “I think you ambushed me.”
Brinly actually looked a little hurt by the accusation.
“What you want and what we need amounts to the same thing,” Olwen said. “Why should it matter that you work with Truepenny as opposed to working alone?”
“Because people like you always want something more than most are willing to offer.”
“We’re not asking you to do anything you weren’t going to do in the first place,” Olwen said.
“You’re asking me to throw in with your agenda,” I said. Then to Brinly, “Let’s just get the roller and go.”
“Truepenny can offer you resources you won’t be able to get elsewhere,” Brinly said.
My patience was wearing.
“I’m not working for you,” I said to Olwen. “But I can agree not to get in your way if your people don’t get in mine. For as long as we want the same thing, that should prove fairly easy.”
Olwen nodded. “Your current terms are acceptable. But you’re right. In the future, I will probably ask something of you that you’re not willing to offer.”
Brinly frowned at Olwen, then pushed me out of the office and closed the door behind me. I could hear the two women arguing, the conversation taking no time at all to get quite heated. I couldn’t make out the words.
It bothered me that Felix didn’t know anything about Truepenny. It bothered me more that Brinly had ambushed me like this. It bothered me most that I’d started to trust her.
“Conor,” Brinly said, startling me. “Are you ready?”
“You mean we finally get to do what we came here for?”
“I’d really like the chance to explain—”
“Save it. Let’s go.”
Brinly stifled the urge to say whatever she’d been hoping to say. I followed her to the front right corner of the building, where a large window looked out on a two-vehicle roller bay where Blue Shirt was standing, waving us in.
Brinly grabbed the keys from Blue Shirt and we climbed into the roller. Brinly pulled up to the bay door as Blue Shirt waved us out. We went through the first bay door, which sealed behind us, into a small antechamber, then through the next bay door that led out to the despoiled great outdoors.
Fortunately, the roller was equipped with an oxygen system and air purifier. I set my breather on my lap and wedged the duffel between my feet, then leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes.
*****
2 November 2042, Birmingham, GDI Headquarters, Former U.S.
Territory
“This is a hospital,” I said, staring out the window into the black night.
“This whole city was practically a hospital in one capacity or another,” Brinly said. “Medical, research, schooling … What is it you were expecting?”
“A government building,” I said.
“You do realize we’re dealing with an organization that’s trying to make a bioweapon they can mass produce, yes?”
We were parked on the side of a street at an intersection with the hospital’s main road. There were at least three buildings that I could see—all connected by skywalks with boarded-up glass panels—and a parking deck. The place looked well intact from the outside. Except for the top part of the parking deck.
Directly across the street was another building that might have belonged to the hospital, a former fast food joint, another parking deck–that-was-not anymore. Fuel station up the street, more might-have-been-a-food-joint collapsed buildings.
The expressway we had passed under was in shambles northbound, but southbound was up and running, if empty. Like the rest of the city seemed to be.
“If this is GDI’s HQ, where is everyone?” I asked.
“Inside,” Brinly said. “This isn’t like the Dublin base or Stockholm. Only authorized field agents come and go—everyone else who works here, lives here.”
“It’s a prison.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Maybe not. Front door?”
“The main building up the drive where the parking deck is collapsed. I’ve got to go to that building.” Brinly pointed to the building behind a large brick wall with sporadically placed blocky lettering faded to a pinkish-beige.
I opened the duffel and grabbed two pistols to replace the SR9s. I made sure they were both loaded, with full magazines, then slid each into the shoulder holster. They didn’t fit as well as the SR9s, but it would do. I put my breather on, waited for Brinly to do the same, and then got out of the roller.
“Careful,” she said, the word coming out muffled through the mask.
I nodded. She drove away.
The atmosphere was thick and heavy on my skin, an uncomfortable pressure, cold and dry and biting.
I walked up the drive, past the dead markings of what once were bushes. The drive wound up, leading to another intersection. I kept up the winding path until I passed the collapsed parking deck. I turned right, took to the pavement on the left that led to the doors of the main hospital.
The building’s exterior looked a little worse for wear up close, but nothing like some of the damage I’d seen elsewhere. Some spots actually looked patched. The card reader on the door was new. I held my warrant card up. I was fairly confident it would grant me access and even more confident that it would work to alert Bernard to my presence.
The door opened, sealing behind me after I walked in.
Here we go.
I took the breather off. Using one of the straps that tightened it around the head, I fastened the breather
securely to a belt loop. I could hear the footsteps coming my way, fast and numerous. I looked over the chairs that crowded around the glass wall at the back of the reception area. I sat down on the nearest chair and waited. There were no longer any magazines about, no reading material of any kind, not anymore.
The space was large and open with many windows. I couldn’t begin to figure out where all the footsteps were coming from due to the echo—the stairs in front of me leading up to the second floor, the ground floor hallway to the left or right? How many rooms were behind the doors? How many hallways?
All I could do was sit and wait.
*****
2 November 2042, Birmingham, GDI Headquarters, Former U.S.
Territory
Agents didn’t arrive. Soldiers did. Streaming out of everywhere. Maybe fifty total? Brinly must have been enjoying a cakewalk if everyone was here to greet me.
The bulk of them came to a stop in a semicircle around where I sat. The rest remained stationed at exit points; there were some closing off the path to the stairs, a few scattered at the second-floor bannister, lined up almost all the way down the hall and out of view. Some stayed in doorways, blocking hallway entrances, and two routed to the door that I’d arrived through.
They all had their GDI-issue LAR-15s trained on me.
The uniforms they wore were overkill—fully masked helmets, gloves, Kevlar vests, no trace of skin showing.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m here to see Agent Bernard,” I said, and stood.
If I hadn’t been looking down, I might have missed it. The slightest movement backward of a foot in front of me. I looked at the owner of the foot.
“It’s a bit overdressed you are, isn’t it?” I asked, reaching for the man. “Warm in here for gloves.”
A gun went off, the bullet deflecting off the floor near my left foot, putting spider web cracks in the tile. But my ears. Shite, my ears were ringing. I looked up, trying to figure out who had fired, but no one was breaking rank as they regarded me through their reflective masks.
“You know that causes tinnitus?” I yelled, wiggling my index finger in my left ear. “Completely inconsiderate. All right, no touching. You could have just said that, you mute bastards. We have language areas in our brains for a reason, yeah?”
I sat down again.
“Or at least some of us do,” I said to no one in particular, since no one in particular was listening.
Mr. No Touch held out a pair of handcuffs. Not your normal cuffs, these. There were attachments on the ends made of some type of gelatinous substance. I recognized the contraption from Felix’s memory. If I put the cuffs on, the gel would conform to my skin.
I did the only reasonable thing I could do after being shot at and having armed men try to take me prisoner even as I was being the very best version of myself.
I shot Mr. No Touch in the foot, pulled his helmet off, and used him as a shield before declaring:
“The virus has been made airborne!”
All the guns lowered, if only slightly, almost imperceptibly. My blood pressure was going in the opposite direction.
“All the masks and bullets in the world can’t save you if I release the infected genome,” I said. “But I’m not here for that. I’m here to speak with Bernard.”
No one spoke—why was I shocked about that?—but there was a shifting in the ranks from the back that moved steadily forward. Bernard walked through the front line, hands in his pockets and humorless smile plastered on his face.
“It’s about time,” I said.
“You played that well, Mr. Quinn,” Bernard said, looking curiously at my right hand.
“Can’t have your silent lapdogs shooting me when there’s business to discuss, now can I?”
“Business? I thought you were here to kill me.”
“It’s a death wish you have, is it? No, Bernard. We have work to do.”
I pulled Felix to the surface.
*****
Why are you making me do this? Felix asked.
Punishment? Power? Convenience? I wasn’t sure what the answer was, so I said nothing.
*****
2 November 2042, Birmingham, GDI Headquarters, Former U.S.
Territory
I dropped Mr. No Touch and straightened. There was a crease between Bernard’s brows that hadn’t been there before, but I couldn’t tell if it was from my actions or his men having collectively backed ten feet away.
“Your office?”
“Should I ask why?” Bernard said, indicating Mr. No Touch.
“One of your men shot at me,” I said. “I just kind of figured they were all clones so killing one was as good as killing another.”
To my not so very slight concern, Bernard didn’t correct the clone hypothesis, but simply led the way to his office.
We walked through the maybe-but-probably-not-clone soldiers, and yes, I absolutely looked into the masks of all of them, trying to see faces, but the reflective tint on their masks made it useless. Bernard led me down a hallway that swept off to the right for a seemingly long time.
We passed several workers, most of whom were dressed casually, some of them carrying weapons, others with clipboards or binders, some just roaming like zombies with nothing to do but wander, as there were obviously no real brains in the building. We stepped into a lift that took us to the third floor and deposited us into yet another hallway.
When we finally reached Bernard’s office I was a little let down by the furnishings. It was nearly as stark as the Dublin office. I followed Bernard through the door, which closed behind me. Bernard sat in the chair behind his desk. He closed the laptop on the desk in front of him and set his hands, fingers interlocked, on the laptop.
“Are you going to sit?” Bernard asked.
I walked across the room, not toward Bernard but toward the wall perpendicular to the door. Two wall-mounted shelves held books of no particular note. No pictures anywhere. No filing cabinet. Other than the laptop, nothing in the office seemed to be important.
“You have a problem, Bernard. And …” I said, turning to him with a smile. I came around to the front of his desk and sat on the edge, angling my body toward him. “I have a problem. Lucky for you, I have a solution.”
“Lucky?” Bernard asked with a laugh. “What problem do I have? Here you are; the virus works beautifully.”
“Our definition of beautiful is certainly not similar,” I mumbled. “From where I stand, it looks like you have an uncontrollable weapon that hasn’t reached its final stages … and can’t. Because it killed your scientist.”
Bernard inclined his head. A small admittance of this as a potential problem. “And your solution?”
“Kaitlyn Henderson.”
“Uncontrollable weapon, indeed,” Bernard said. He sighed as he leaned back in the chair, propping his feet on the edge of the desk. I couldn’t tell if he was feigning indifference or disbelief as he said, “And you would let yourself go through what you believe to be the final stages of Kazic?”
“Conditionally, of course. It’s not like it ruins my life and I’m not fond of Felix much, so,” I said, standing back up. “I work with GDI, not for you. And if you ever try to control me again, you’ll be able to count your final breaths on one hand. I promise you that.”
“A bold threat and a lot to ask,” Bernard said, voice devoid of emotion. “No one is irreplaceable.”
“I am.”
Bernard smiled. “No, Mr. Quinn. Valuable? Yes. But should you prove to be more trouble than you’re worth, you will be put down. Killing Dr. Esposito instead of Dr. Henderson is already working against you.”
“Not killing them both works in my favor. And yours. We’ll call it a wash.”
Bernard studied me, his face dropping into that blankness I found so eerie. “Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. Quinn?” There was anger in the question.
“Not at all. I think—” He held up a hand to stop me as he lowered his feet t
o the floor and leaned forward in his chair.
“You think you can come here and bargain with me. That by getting into my good graces, you’ll have the opportunity to undermine me.”
I shook my head. “I’m tired of running, Sean,” I said, hoping the switch to his first name would endear me to him a little. “I’m tired of hiding. I’m so fecking tired of existing without actually living. Working with you offers a certain amount of freedom, and while I’m betting it’s limited, it’s still more than I have now. Working with you means that I can at least have my body back.”
“My heart simply aches for you,” Bernard said dryly. I smiled and shrugged.
“I wouldn’t have met with you if I didn’t have confidence that you’d make the smart decision.”
“Not necessarily the right decision.”
“No decision is ever the right one, just the better one,” I said. “And this is the closest you’ll get to either in this case.”
“Say we go through with this proposed arrangement. Dr. Henderson will agree?”
“She has no choice,” I said, not elaborating. “She’ll finish Kazic.”
“Making assurances, demands, threats. I’m supposed to, what? Roll over and agree? Mr. Quinn, that seems quite naïve.”
“That’s why I made sure not to come empty handed. I’m going to give you something. A peace offering.”
Bernard raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
“I’m offering you Rian Connell.”
Bernard sat still and silent, presumably in thought.
“He’s more your problem than mine,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not anymore. He’s coming after you, Bernard. He’s coming after you for what you did to Felix. And after that, he’ll take GDI. If he climbs into bed with GDI, then his substantial resources become unlimited.”
Something happened to Bernard’s face. The flash of anger I’d seen earlier showed through again, bright and eager, and I don’t think he even noticed.
“He couldn’t,” Bernard mumbled. I didn’t ask for clarification. Bernard was in his own head now, it seemed, so I’d leave him there to think things over. In that moment, Bernard became truly frightening. He seemed bigger, maybe, or somehow just more there. He finally looked at me and nodded.
