Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Are we getting there today?” Felicity only lets a sliver of frustration slip into her voice. “Or are you here to tell us to go back home?”

  Smythe looks uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “The Americans have arranged something.” The word “Americans” seems to cause him particular problems, as if he is saying the sentence around a word lodged between his teeth.

  “So we’re going. Terminal?” Felicity says. She is brusque and unflappably efficient. She is, I think, very admirable. I step a little closer to her.

  “I’ll drive you,” says Smythe with a magnanimous, if slightly put-upon smile. With an arm he offers the interior of his car.

  We drive in relative silence. The brooding anger of Heathrow’s crowd pressing up against the car windows.

  And yet, I have to say having someone screw around with our flight is significantly better than that person throwing large metal objects at my head.

  And then I realize that I’m about to get into a large metal object entirely dependent on the sort of computers that Version 2.0, or whoever else it might be, likes to diddle viciously.

  I’ve been in a plane that fell out of the sky, and it wasn’t so much fun that I’d like to repeat the experience.

  “I don’t think we can go,” I say suddenly.

  Everyone looks at me. Smythe in particular seems to think this is a poor suggestion. Felicity wrinkles her brow.

  “He’s going to crash the plane,” I say. “It’s about the only thing he didn’t throw at us yesterday. He’s already screwed with an enormous number of planes today. How will this be hard for him?”

  Tabitha looks at me with a long hard stare.

  “Swim the Atlantic. We will,” she tells me, “if that’s what it takes. Delete him. What we are going to do. Help me. What you are going to do.”

  Occasionally I think Tabitha is in a fight with Kayla for being the scariest person on this team.

  “Actually,” Smythe says, with the same forced air that he told us about our new flight arrangements, “the Americans seem to think their plane will be safe.”

  This sounds dubious to me. I let my face express that.

  Smythe gives an uncomfortable shrug. “Truth be told they may be right. One of their DARPA secret projects.”

  I mentally check the acronym. Something, advanced research projects, something. Mad military science, the internet would have me believe.

  Smythe looks as if he’s swallowing something unpleasant. “We didn’t exactly know they’d flown it here until they pointed it out to us on the airfield.”

  There is a collective raising of eyebrows.

  Smythe grimaces. “Bloody show offs.”

  THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET HIGHER UP

  While this plane may be a multi-million dollar expression of military might and stealth, no one seems to have thought to put a single comfy seat in it. Black sleek lines, mirrored surfaces, and no headroom—the interior of this thing is a triumph of geometry over ergonomics. From the outside, it also resembles a metal paper airplane more than anything that can do Mach two ever should in my opinion.

  On the plus side, no one has flung this thing at the Atlantic yet to see if it bounces.

  AND BACK DOWN AGAIN

  I descend from the stealth jet legs akimbo. The JFK airport tarmac is surprisingly sunny, though the temperature is doing little to match the sun’s promise. Planes and grass and low buildings spread off in all directions.

  Felicity steps down after me and slips an arm around my waist while she cracks her neck one way and the other.

  “You half expecting this place to blow up?”

  “A little more than half,” I admit. There are a lot of large metal objects with computers in them here.

  “He hasn’t been aggressive since the funeral,” she says. “We’ve no reason to think he couldn’t have continued the attack. Maybe he’s changed tactics. The Heathrow incident was virtually peaceful.”

  Him. She’s already using that as the pronoun. Not it. Not them. Him. As if it’s already a fait accompli that Clyde is the one behind everything.

  But maybe that’s the smart thing to do. Mentally prepare for the confrontation now, rather than deal with the mental whiplash later.

  Maybe…

  The others have disembarked too. Tabitha shields her eyes against the low sun, scans the foreign landscape, and points.

  “Contact. Ours. There.”

  We turn to look. There’s a man wearing what appears to be a standard-issue CIA man-in-black suit crossing the tarmac toward us.

  Seeing our collective gaze, he raises a hand and gives us a broad wave in a very un-man-in-black way.

  “Yo!” I hear him shout over the tarmac. “MI37 dudes!”

  My brow immediately furrows. This feels weirder than jet-lag alone can account for. I turn to Felicity.

  “Did he just call us—”

  “Yes,” says Felicity, looking a little concerned, “he did.”

  “I could kill him from here,” Kayla comments.

  Which seems like a drastic solution to our problem. If it even is a problem.

  “Surely,” I say, “someone disguising themselves as a CIA contact would not go as far off stereotype to call us dudes, right?”

  Felicity cocks her head. “Your argument,” she says, “is that he’s so unlikely a CIA man, he has to be one?”

  I think that through. “Yes.”

  Felicity shrugs. “Decent enough theory.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” She pecks me on the cheek. “Now let’s go see what he has to say.”

  “No worries,” Kayla says as we set off, “I can kill him up close too.”

  We cross the tarmac, cold winds sweeping out of the deceptively sunny sky. Say what you like about the damp in England, at least its winds aren’t armed with razor blades. I wish I’d packed a thicker coat.

  Our CIA man is waiting by the sort of slick black car Smythe favors. He’s young and strikingly handsome. Sharp cheekbones, dark eyes in lightly tanned skin. His hair is dark and shiny in a way that is usually reserved for TV ads. He wears it surprisingly long for a man in black—down to his shoulders, and the wind buffets it about his face. He has to push strands out of his eyes twice before he can extend his hand for Felicity to shake. I see pale green tattoos poking out from under the starched white shirt.

  “Dudes,” he says again as he pumps Felicity’s hand. “Very cool to meet you all. Totally, I mean…” He puts his spare hand to his forehead and mimes a small detonation. “Read your files last night. Mind blown. Trippy shit, man. Trippy as hell.” He extends a clenched fist toward me—a slow motion punch. I stare at his hand.

  “Fist bump?” he asks me. “No? That’s cool.” He nods. “Very cool.” He grips my hand in a firm, warm shake. “Didcot incident.” He winks at me. “Freaking awesome.”

  For some reason—and I am not sure if I agree with my face on this one—I am smiling.

  He turns to Kayla. Hesitates. “I wasn’t… Do you actually shake hands?”

  Kayla just looks at him. The way the sun looks at the desert.

  “Righteous.”

  And seriously now? But my smile keeps on growing.

  Skipping Kayla, he turns to Tabitha, grins. He has very white teeth. Of course he does.

  “Do not tell them I said this, but our tech boys are literally wetting their pants to get to meet you. It’s insane back at the shop. Totally insane.” He holds out a hand. “Very excited to meet you.”

  Tabitha stares at his hand for a moment. As if she’s making a decision. And then she grabs it and gives it a firm shake.

  “Pleasure,” she says. “All that shit.”

  The CIA man winks. He actually winks. Something Tabitha did convinced him that winking was the right thing to do. And somehow, and this is the part I really do not understand, the bastard was right.

  Tabitha doesn’t exactly smile, but she doesn’t rip his arm off and shove it up his arse either. Overall,
I think this guy is batting above average.

  His arm retrieved from Tabitha’s grasp he extends it toward the car. “My name’s…” He hesitates then gives a grin. “Well, everyone just calls me Gran. Chariot is totally awaiting us. You dudes want to take a ride?”

  He gives the impression that he’d actually be totally fine with us saying no. I’m not sure if that means he’s a really decent bloke, or just terrifyingly deceptive. But I find I don’t want to turn down his ride. Despite the suit and the car he seems genuine in a way someone like Smythe has probably forgotten exists.

  I try to get a quick read of Felicity’s feelings as we slip into the car, but she’s clamped down with a carefully neutral expression. She could have fallen in love or could be preparing to kill the man.

  Occasionally, my girlfriend is a little bit scary.

  No one else goes for the passenger seat, so I take it, sitting next to Gran.

  “So,” I say, “what part of the world does the name Gran come from?” He doesn’t seem exactly like the elderly-maternal-relative type. “Is that European?”

  He starts to laugh.

  “Not European then,” I guess.

  “Dude, Gran isn’t my real name,” he says, still grinning. “My folks went with Calvin Wilfred Monk the third. Bit of an uncharacteristic absence of cool on their part.”

  I do the mental math. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m not one hundred percent seeing how that shortens down to Gran.”

  “It’s short for Granola,” he says. “Like the breakfast cereal.”

  This is worse than when Clyde explained magical theory to me. “You’re nicknamed after a breakfast cereal?”

  “I think maybe, like, we’ve got some cultural associations getting in the way,” he says. “Granola is, you know, associated with a certain lifestyle this side of the pond.”

  “High-fiber living?”

  Gran tempers his eye roll with a chuckle. “It’s the whole hippy thing.”

  A hippy CIA agent. Sadly it sort of makes sense that if MI37 is going to deal with any member of the CIA it would be the hippy one.

  “Are there…” I hesitate, not wanting to offend, but it’s just too bizarre to not probe further. “Are there many hippy CIA agents?”

  “Erm…” Gran thinks on this as he drives us onto a small route between hulking aircraft. “I guess it probably, like, correlates to the percentage of hippies in the US total. I mean, I know the TV likes to, you know, show the CIA as a bunch of evil suit clones, but… well, that’s fucking Hollywood, man. You can’t believe everything they tell you.”

  I refrain from telling him that that’s been my basic survival strategy since I started at MI37.

  Still, for the most part I like this man. God knows if he’s any good at his job, but he is personable, and pleasant, and seems handy with a smile in the same way Kayla is handy with a sword. And, to be honest, I find the former skill puts me more at ease.

  “So,” I say, resisting the urge to glance over my shoulder at Tabitha, “you guys think you’re up against Clyde.”

  “Yeah.” Gran nods regretfully. “Total bummer, your dude going all batshit on you. He sounded like a real nice guy. But…” He shrugs.

  Whether the motion is meant to recall Clyde or not it does, and I find my knee-jerk need to defend the man is activated again.

  “Do you have any proof it’s him?”

  The back of the car goes very quiet. I can imagine Felicity shouting at me that we need to make a good impression with the big boys, but I keep my eyes off her and on Gran.

  The CIA man seems to think that now is an OK time to take his eyes off the road and return my appraising stare. This causes me to break mine and scan for oncoming death threats.

  “Totally see where you’re coming from, man. Totally do. I mean, I get it. He was a friend. It’s… Look, it’s like this. The government has seen, like—and I’m not even shitting you on this—a five hundred percent increase in hack attempts since your buddy went all apparently dead. And it’s not just that. The big mind fucker is that they’ve almost all been successful. You know how many of the usual attempts get through. Like nothing, man. It’s tiny. It’s crazy. We’re like, really good at keeping our shit locked down tight. We’re a government. We’re the man. That’s kind of what we do.

  “But whoever started knocking on our firewalls is, like, laughing at us, man. Just taking stuff apart at the code level. At speeds people can’t do it. Like regular meat people. And we’re never hacked the same way twice. So some digital thing is just ripping through our stuff, like it’s sport, man. Code bleeding and tattered on the ground. Digital slaughterhouse. And people don’t write those programs that fast. It just doesn’t happen. And these attacks are happening all simultaneously. All hours. All the time.”

  Gran’s eyes depart the road to engage me again. “It’s an AI, man. Like, a totally ridiculous badass-as-shit AI. Like, drop acid on top of acid mindblowing AI. Insane. And so, we look into the list of available, you know, crazy insane AI badasses, and our list says Clyde Marcus Bradley and, like, that’s it man. That’s who we’ve got.” He shrugs again.

  I glance toward the back of the car. And I think we all get that this is not a good story Agent Gran is telling us. This is not something that we will tell our grandchildren by crackling fireplaces in our winter years. But it’s Felicity who looks truly horror struck.

  “But…” she manages. “Nuclear codes…”

  “Oh, dude!” Gran throws his hands up in the air, and the car careens wildly for a moment. “Don’t even start. That would be, like…” Again the hands show the mental explosion. “Nah, we have those on a computer waaaaaaay off the grid. Not even funny how locked down that shit is.”

  Felicity looks significantly relieved.

  “But,” I say, still not entirely willing to give into the cold cruel grasp of logic, “it’s still not necessarily him.”

  “Oh no.” Gran shakes his head with enthusiasm. “No, no, no, no, no, no. No. Totally could be someone, something else. Maybe the Chinese managed to sneak something by us. Some terrorist cell. Bill Gates may have gone off the deep end. Totally happens. Bunch of totally viable alternatives. It’s just, you know, this guy Clyde—massively, massively likely it’s him.”

  Oh. OK then. Well…

  Gran pilots the car out of the airport and onto a sprawling road of rushing cars and trucks. Manhattan juts sharply out of the horizon, glistening, scraping at the sky. A teetering testament to capitalism and industry.

  “Come on, man,” Gran says, following my eye line. “Let’s go to the capital of the world, settle in, and work out how to erase your friend from the face of the earth. It’ll be totally awesome. You’ll love it.”

  9

  Yellow taxis; herds of pedestrians; billboards screaming—Gran bludgeons his way through New York traffic.

  Even after we exit the canyons of steel and glass of midtown and skim past the great green lacquer of Central Park, the city keeps its sense of the alien. It is as if someone had heard of a European city but never actually seen one. Everything is so familiar and yet so insistently not from home. There is a feeling of having stepped through the Looking Glass. We drive past a place called Alice’s Tea Room. It doesn’t help the impression.

  “Where are you located?” Felicity asks from the back of the car.

  “Area 51?” Gran says. “About three hundred feet beneath Columbia University. It’s—”

  But I interrupt at that point. “Area 51?” I ask. Pop culture alarm bells are ringing in my head.

  “Yeah, man.” Gran nods. “Our division of the CIA. We have that whole name-legacy thing. It’s no biggie. Really.”

  No biggie? Area 51 is like solid conspiracy theory gold. It’s a name that summons grainy video images of alien Grays on dissecting tables, and visions of sweaty middle-aged men hunting through New Mexico desert while exchanging probing stories. And… “You’re beneath Columbia University?” The home of the Manhattan Project. My incredulity me
ter is red-lining.

  “Yeah, man,” Gran says. “It’s pretty awesome. Research resources for our kind of stuff are just totally magnificent. And the place is mad with recruitment choices. Plus students are always holding. It’s great.”

  From Felicity’s expression—glimpsed in the rearview mirror—that last criteria is not one that she is overly concerned about.

  “Area 51?” I’m shocked to hear Kayla’s Scottish brogue chime in. “Like in the movies?”

  “Well.” Gran shrugs again. “Like, yes on the name. But the movies are… you know. Whole Hollywood thing again.”

  As much as I like Agent Gran, I think he and I have different opinions on the merits of big studio movie productions.

  “But,” Kayla persists. “Feckin’ Roswell.”

  Gran rolls his eyes. “Aw, man. We are, like, never going to live that shit down. Total, just, like, nightmare. I mean totally before my time. So, mea not very culpa, but…” He facepalms.

  “Wait,” I say, because this is something I really want to get straight. “The CIA really did recover an alien space craft at Roswell?”

  Gran looks at me and blinks. Twice. Slowly. “No, dude. Course not. I mean… you’ve met aliens. Fucking weird as shit they are. This Gray bullshit…” He shakes his head. “Man, I would love bipedal aliens, man. That’d be awesome.”

  Again, given my experience, not an opinion I completely share.

  “Nah, Roswell, was like…” He stops. “Wait, how does security clearance work with you guys being contracted?”

  We all turn to Felicity. She looks stumped.

  “Screw it.” Agent Gran waves a hand. “The Area was messing around with all this cyborg stuff back in the late forties after the war. They had this ship that was, like, fifty percent organic. Like, some agent totally restitched into the mechanics of it. Really early example of total interface bodyscaping. Before they worked out, you know, like all the psychological ramifications of turning someone into meat wallpaper and pasting him over an engine and shit. Dude went batshit. Had to shoot the poor bastard down. Set us back, like ten years.”