Control: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 38)

by Robert J. Crane

  Chapman

  Now

  Jaime Chapman let out a long laugh, the jangling, discordant notes ringing out in Sienna Nealon's face. “So he told you that Bilson was going to be responsible for the deaths of millions in China and you just...believed him?” He laughed again, even louder and longer.

  Nealon just stared at him, framed by the lit office behind her, like a dark shadow that had crept into the middle of his calm sanctuary. “Yes,” she said, “I do believe him.”

  “Then you're an even bigger idiot than I thought,” Chapman said, feeling that thrum of panic run through him. Some of this was performative; he was searching for a way out, and to him, it seemed like this man who could see the future? Had to be a weak point, if Nealon lived by this supposed code she'd laid out for him. “Because there are no definites in life, and your friend there – well, he was just telling you what you wanted to hear so you could do what you wanted to do all along.”

  She shook her head. “There's nothing in it for him, other than helping me. He didn't want me to even try. 'We can do this simpler, more expediently, without you going to work in the FBI.' He wanted to shortcut it, kill you all out of the spotlight from the start.” She smiled, leaning in. “Which is, I understand from my grandmother's probing of Flanagan, something you all contemplated doing to me.”

  Chapman's blood chilled. “Don't think you're better than us. You're not. You killed–”

  “Yes,” she said. “I killed or caused to be killed, all of you so far. But I really struggled with it, because when I kill someone, they've almost always got a weapon in hand, and are about to cause harm to others. But you really break the mold, Chapman. You're a special kind of villain. And that required special measures.”

  “I'm not a villain at all,” Chapman said hoarsely. There seemed to be a scratch in his throat.

  “There's no one you wouldn't sacrifice to achieve your ends. That's what makes you the villain, Jaime. Not ambition. Wanting to do something, build something, or make things better, those are fine aims. It's that you're willing to destroy anyone and everyone in the process – that's what makes you evil. Not desire, but the total lack of check on it.”

  “Because I'm willing to make sacrifices to make the world a better place?”

  “Because you're willing to sacrifice others to shape the world to your liking. If you were just making your own sacrifices, that'd be fine. In fact, if you were sacrificing yourself – your life, honor, money, reputation – to help or save others, that'd kinda make you a hero.”

  “Like you?” he scoffed. “Well, let me tell you a little something about yourself and your brilliant plan, hero – even you couldn't see everything.” He smirked. “Even you couldn't save everyone.”

  Sienna just stared at him, and a little smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “You talking about Julie Blair?”

  Not for the first time tonight, Chapman felt a cold tingle creep down his spine.

  “Of course I know about her,” she said. “I was monitoring your communications, remember? But more than that, Harry gave me her name months ago. I've been watching her – or we have, since I couldn't do it myself. We saw every word of what you did to that poor woman, tearing her life apart. And then, when you pushed her–”

  “I didn't–”

  “Why bother lying?” she asked, cocking her head at him in pure curiosity, like he was some test subject she was studying. “We saw the whole thing, from start to finish. I mean, what you did with the emotional predictive software and pushing alerts and bad news at her...” She shuddered. “In case you're wondering...that was the moment I decided to kill you.”

  “But you still couldn't save her,” Jaime whispered in quiet triumph. If this was the only thing he had left, he'd be damned if he didn't gut her with it, cut that stupid, bullshit morality facade away and leave her exposed before–

  She laughed. “But I did save her.”

  “Her body hit the pavement,” Chapman said with full certainty.

  Nealon shook her head slowly. “No, it didn't.”

  “I saw–”

  “You saw what I wanted you to see,” she said, smiling at him. “Now...wanna know what actually happened?”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN

  Julie

  She took that last, wobbling step and cool, night air rushed over her as Julie tumbled over the balcony–

  One floor down, something caught her beneath the arms. Something fast. Something...

  That smelled like...sweat and wind.

  Her feet were dangling over thin air, and Julie looked up–

  “Sienna...Nealon?”

  There was really no mistaking that famous face, but as Julie watched it split into a look of pure, uncomfortable contrition. “Yeah, Julie, it's me. Sorry I'm late.”

  Julie just stared up at her as the city of Washington flashed by below, her hair blowing in the wind. “You...you know me...?” A hard sob racked her body, but Sienna's strong grip had her, wouldn't let her go, and she knew this. “You...you...why?”

  “Because I know a little something about how it feels when powerful people gang up to destroy your life and reputation,” she said. “You didn't deserve what happened to you, and I'm sorry it went on as long as it did.”

  “I...I didn't do...” Julie cried. “I didn't...”

  “I know you didn't,” she said quietly. “I know. You were a victim in all this.”

  “But...why?” Julie sobbed.

  “Because you helped me,” Sienna said, smiling down on her. “You helped me when I was on that boat, alone, going up against China. They hated that. You helped save me, Julie. Now I'm going to repay the favor.”

  “I don't know how you can,” Julie said. “It's all...all ruined. I don't know who they are, but they...they wrecked everything.” She hung her head. “They ruined me. I mean...look what I just did.” And she burst into a fresh round of tears, quietly, slipping down her windswept cheeks and falling on the dark city below.

  “I know this is going to be tough,” Sienna said, and the wind died as they drifted down to a rooftop. “But you need to hear this. Life is never easy. It is never going to be easy. Even when it goes well for a while, death, adversity, struggle, depression – all these and so many more are always waiting to leap on you, just as sure as the Network unleashed hell on you now.”

  Julie's bare feet touched down on the rough, sandy-feeling rooftop. A thousand lights of Washington DC winked back at her. “Then...why bother fighting it? You could have just let me drop. Then it would be over.” She sniffled.

  “I can't do that, Julie,” Sienna said, though her voice sounded riven. “This thing they've done? It was cruel and vicious and terrible, and I can't even pretend it's not going to hurt for years.” She came around from Julie's back and put both hands on her shoulders, looking her straight in the eye. “But these people tried to define you to the world. You can't let them.”

  “How do I fight back against that?” Julie asked, cheeks cold and yet warm, as fresh tears flowed down them. “They did it...and I couldn't do anything about it.”

  “I know,” Sienna said, and pulled her in, hugging her tight. “I know. And sometimes that happens, and I don't really know what to tell you about it other than saying, 'It sucks.' And that it's wrong, and evil, but...that it happens anyway. You didn't do anything, but even your family believed it. They defined you, and the world – and the people who cared most about you – bought it. And maybe, just maybe...” She brushed her skin against Julie's chin, the first time, Julie realized, she'd actually touched the succubus's flesh. It was warmer than she would have thought. “...you started to believe it, too.”

  Julie nodded slowly. “How do you stand everyone calling you...everyone saying about you...”

  She put a hand on Julie just below the collar of her shirt. “You need to know who you are. Because if you know who you are, the whole world telling you something different won't change it for you.” She brushed a hand against Julie's
cheek, just for a second again. “But I know you didn't do any of those things, either.”

  “...You do?” Julie asked. There was this faint feeling, something far off, the like of which she hadn't felt in...

  Well, since the meeting with Betsy where this whole disaster had started.

  Hope.

  “I do. Are you ready to fight back?” Sienna asked. “Because I can't promise you it'll be easy. But I think...with some help...we can clear all this up. If you're willing to dig in and fight.” She smiled resolutely. “Come on, Julie. Do it for your kids.”

  Julie swallowed heavily, then nodded once. “I...yes. Yes. I'll fight. For them. And...” She swallowed, and some of that fear passed as though she'd just swallowed it away. “And for me.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT

  Chapman

  “I call bullshit,” Chapman said, shaking his head slowly at the end of her risible tale. “I saw the body hit the ground. Julie Blair is dead, and all your fairy tales about how you're such a hero that you could save her don't erase the fact that she dropped like a tossed stone–”

  “Hey, Jaime, quick question for you, Mr. Genius,” Sienna said, so imperturbably calm as to be almost insufferable, “do you know how Heather Chalke died?”

  Chapman froze. The line between the two points of data was obvious, and yet– “You didn't. You couldn't have.” His mouth felt dry. “...How?”

  Sienna smiled. “ArcheGrey1819, my boy Harry, my grandmother and great-grandmother, all working in unison with my therapist. ArcheGrey bombarded Chalke's browser with ads for the same hotel Julie Blair checked into while she was looking for a 'secure location.' Harry helped, like a predictive behavior algorithm, and the two of them pushed her to the right place. Then Arche hacked the check-in system and got her the room right below Julie's. My therapist, Dr. Zollers – he's a telepath, by the way – he allowed my team to bypass Chalke's guards and get Heather to open the door, and – well, I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say Chalke went leaping out of the window more or less of her own accord, and at exactly the moment we needed her to.”

  Chapman slumped. “You got them all.”

  “And they never saw us coming. Like you.” She leaned in closer to Chapman, and he was reminded, again, of Gwen, which brought up another question.

  “Gwen was a real person, though,” Chapman said, looking up. “She's out there somewhere...right?”

  Sienna shook her head. “No. I've been dreamwalking to you for months. That first meeting, in the cafe? You dozed off coming off a coding binge. I never came to you in the daytime because–”

  “Gwen never came to me in the daytime because she's a CEO of a small company,” Chapman said. “She's a busy person, like me. She–”

  “Oh, she's a busy person, all right,” Sienna said, pacing a small circle around him. “Because she's an FBI agent by day, and only able to contact you when we're both sleeping.”

  “But I've talked to her on the phone,” Chapman said, blinking, trying to find the hole in this. It couldn't have been her all along...?

  “No,” she said, “I've dreamwalked to you and fit the circumstances to what I pick up from your subconscious. If you fall asleep in a car, or on a plane, well...Gwen couldn't very well just show up there, could she? So I dreamwalk a phone call, instead.” She looked around. “I usually put in the effort to match the environment almost completely, but tonight...” She shrugged. “I'm tired, it's been a long week, and I'm just about ready to wrap things up.”

  “But...” Chapman sputtered, “...she and I have been...intimate...we've–”

  “Only in your dreams, pal,” she said with a dirty smirk. “And trust me...not even then, really. I just left you with the pleasurable sense that we did, because...yeah, no, I'm not that kind of succubus.”

  “But if you just messed with my dreams...how could I have...you fooled me,” he said in disgust. “That's not a dream, that's...”

  “Well, it sort of is,” she said. “It's a power of mine that I'd never really used or understood until this last year. I learned about it from my grandmother. It's called 'the Thrall,' and it lets me control a man through the dreamwalk. Not easily; I couldn't just jump into a random guy's dream, someone I didn't know at all, and make him do crazy shit. I need to know something about him, I have to come to him in a form that would make him emotionally...movable, let's say.”

  She disappeared, and Gwen appeared in her place. “Which is why I created a new persona, just for you. Girl of your dreams. I mean, it's not like you'd have trusted and told your secrets to Sienna Nealon.”

  “But...why?” He turned, and Nealon was back to herself now, over his shoulder. “You had access to the Network, why–?”

  “As you pointed out, probabilities aren't ever a hundred percent,” she said, leaning over and whispering in his ear. “I made lots of plans, some of which never became necessary. Some of them...didn't work the way I'd planned.” She sounded regretful. “For instance, Julie Blair? I got her name a long time ago, and was trying to figure out a way to spare her from what you did long before it happened. I couldn't, though. Not without killing you sooner, and I just couldn't justify repaying slander with murder. Just like I couldn't justify killing you on my own account until you made the move against the president.”

  Chapman felt his face harden. “It needed to be done.”

  “'It needed to be done?'” Sienna laughed. “You know why you wanted to kill Gondry? Because you decided if you couldn't control something, you had to destroy it. Like me.” Her face grew harder, all mirth erased from it. “Like Julie.”

  “What about the black smoke creature?” Chapman asked, grasping at straws. He could feel the conversational grains slipping through the hourglass, and was not eager to find out what happened when they were all gone. She couldn't kill him in a dream, could she...? “The one that stole the diary?”

  “Another wheel in motion,” she said, and the malice on her face disappeared. “He was a friend of a friend, but a trustworthy one. He got the diary out of your grasp. I was hoping we could use it as evidence against you in a trial, but...that was a long shot, and it just didn't pay off. So we Plan B'd it, and he pushed Johannsen's name out there for us to start pulling your pieces off the board.”

  “You never actually fought him,” Chapman said.

  “Nope,” she said. “Used my flight powers to simulate being thrown around, like it was a real battle. Hurt for real, too. But with my Wolfe healing back online, it didn't hurt too bad for too long. I've been using those secret powers for a while now, but I had to be careful about it. Couldn't let you guys think I was back to being able to shrug off bullets, but at the same time I didn't want to ever be down for too long. So I goosed my natural healing a little here and there. Like after I got the shit kicked out of me in Baltimore against that Chinese beetle meta.”

  “You were hiding all these powers,” Chapman said. “All along.”

  “Just the ice power,” she said. “Though I did use it against Grendel during one of our fights because...well, I had to in order to survive. Iced his arm, broke it off, and shoved it into his rib cage. But I didn't realize I had access to the others – via shadows, faint memories of the souls I lost – still in me.”

  “How?” Chapman croaked. “You lost them in Scotland.”

  “I did,” she said, nodding. “That Scottish bitch took them from me. And they are gone – the people, I mean. I don't have access to their counsel, their personalities anymore, but...I do have a residual echo of them that lets me use their powers. It's harder than it used to be.” She put fingers to her head. “And Harmon's telepathy power? I can't get that one to work at all, really.”

  Chapman smirked. “You're not smart enough.”

  A flicker of amusement lit her eyes. “Maybe. Or not disciplined enough, at least. I lack training...but I've got a teacher willing to help, once I get home. See, that's how I beat you. With the people I trusted.”

  “We thought we ha
d you,” Chapman said quietly. “We thought we'd separated you from the people you trusted.”

  She chuckled. “Because you were monitoring my phone? Trusting me to be as dumb as you assumed I was?” She made a mocking, hillbilly voice. “Stupid ol' Sienna Nealon, why she ain't even got a high school diploma. She is dumb as a box of rocks, couldn't possibly see through our super smart genius schemes to take over the world.” She stopped the voice. “And you're right, of course. If I was just me, on my own, or even me with the friends you know about.”

  She leaned in close to his ear. “But you kept me on the run for two years, in the shadows. And while I was there, I met so many other people like me. Creatures of the shadows, I guess you could say. So while you were watching my 'light side' friends, I was building a 'dark side' crew that you'd never see coming.”

  “I see it now,” Chapman said. “We missed it totally.”

  “You were always going to miss it,” she said. “You're a smart guy, Jaime, but like so many smart, powerful people in this so-called civilized world, you're awfully arrogant. You're a man living in the most prosperous, genteel time our world has ever seen. Power, to you, is political, technological, built on those civilizational assumptions. You've given little thought to its roots.”

  “I know more than you think,” Jaime said.

  “Then you know that the root of power is force.” She stared at him, unsmiling, unflinching. “'Do what I want or I will crush you.' You used the proxies of government, of the law, of the press – social destruction, reputational destruction – and thought they were the be all, end all. But they're just...avatars, I guess you could say. Concepts standing in for the real thing. The thing you never truly understood.”

  Chapman smacked dry lips together. “And what's that?”

  She was in his face, suddenly, so fast he didn't even see it. “Violence. This is a civilized world because the costs to the people who choose to be uncivilized are expressed in a series of escalations whose ultimate end is violence. You get a parking ticket and don't pay it? The police eventually show up to your house to arrest you. Refuse to comply? They'll use force to make you. Resist, get too out of hand? They might even kill you – if it gets that far. At the core, humanity and civilization is predicated on violence. It's our natural state – but we've done our best to distance ourselves from it. Push it back, deny it, put all these blocks – these kinder, gentler measures – in place to make it less blatant than the days when we were warring tribes, pillaging our enemies and living through might making right.