Fletcher (9 page)

“This is me, Vincent. I’m always in control. I just choose to not show it sometimes.”

I paused for a beat, before continuing in a bolder tone. “Don’t forget the last time we were together. I broke that man, in the station. You needed me there, and your side of the bargain fizzled. I—God, you’re actually going to force me to say it—I need your help now. I know you know people. Contractors, witness protection, something. RailTech might have a lot of high-ups in their pocket, but they can’t own everyone. Please?”

Another sigh from Vincent, this one slightly softer. My approach was working.

“We might have someone. Goes under the handle
Zephyr
.”

“You can’t be seri—okay. Okay. I’m listening.”

“Good. If this works out, we can get an eye inside RailTech. Zephyr has a...history with RailTech. Unsavoury. I’ll leave it at that. Ultimately, he has a vested interest in getting inside, but he needs someone to help him out. We can’t intervene directly: they might not own everyone, but they have a lot of ears, even at my level. That’s where you come in, K. We’ll make plans. How’s your Saturday evening looking?”

#
0725

“It’s so nice to kill someone on home soil again. After so long in Africa, with the blood and infected and the guerrilla warfare, it’s nice to just land, get in a cab and garrotte the driver.

“I probably shouldn’t have done it while doing eighty on the highway, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I should probably talk to Valerie about this piece of glass, because I’m pretty sure that’s bad news for my liver.

“Great, and here are the cops. Time to act like I didn’t just choke my driver to death.”

12: Honour Among Murderers

The smell of seared flesh teased my nostrils. Vincent worked in the kitchen, humming. Across the table sat his link, identified chiefly by a slash of black hair and his handle: ‘Zephyr’. Vincent was smart to cook; the promise of his food helped dilute my mood. I despised fancy handles, and all the jumped-up, pretend-secret-agent absurdity that came with them.

Just pick a name. Or a letter. Even a number. ‘Zephyr’ makes me want to neuter you with a cheese grater.

His eyes hadn’t left me since I had arrived via the window. The narrow slits gave off an air of aggressive indifference, but his dilated pupils and forced breathing betrayed fear and anxiety. I wondered what leverage Vincent had used to get him here.

“What makes you think Vincent has leverage on me?”

Thinking aloud. Focus.

“Because if you know the first thing about me, you didn’t come of your own accord.”

Good save.

“Says who? Maybe I want to be here. You don’t scare me.”

“This is the part of the movie that I lean across the table and whisper ‘I should’, right? I’d rather just guess your backstory. Murder? Arson? Trafficking? You’re not the right build for an enforcer, but maybe—”

              “—wait a second—”

              “—I’m going with fraud, you seem the type.”

Real anger flashed in his eyes.

“You don’t know me. You know nothing about—”

Vincent swooped in, setting a rack of meat on the table before looking deeply into Zephyr’s eyes.

“How many bodies did you find?” he asked, quietly.

Zephyr shrivelled like a burning rose. His mouth opened to form a weak protest, but Vincent cut him off again.

“Only two.”

Zephyr bit his knuckle. I revelled in the expectation of vomit, but he was stronger than that. Barely, but he kept it down. I giggled and raised my glass.

“This is good. You’re involved, somehow. Haunted. Driven. I think we’ll get along.”

Vincent uttered my name in warning as he dished dinner out. Z stared at his plate sullenly, collecting his thoughts. I peered over the rim of the salad bowl and laughed again.

“Croutons, Vincent? Really? You might think that croutons make you seem classy, but all I’m hearing is: Hi! I’m Vincent! I pay for toast.”

Zephyr gasped as pain blossomed from my ear. I had seen the knife in flight, but the wine had robbed me of my keenest reflexes. Vincent’s hand had been little more than a blur. I tutted and pulled a sultry face.

“Touchy-touchy.”

“You’ve had enough to drink. Give.” Vincent’s tone was firm and levelled.

I gnawed on the lip of the glass before draining it. I wasn’t offered a refill. Blood seeped into the left side of my shirt.

The meat was divine. I savoured the rare flesh and the minutes of silence that it arrived with. Even Zephyr regained his appetite. Vincent’s eyes flicked between his two guests incessantly, half-intrigued and half-wary.

Eventually I spoke. “So, what did you do?”

It was Zephyr’s turn to polish off his drink, before taking a deep breath. I took advantage of the distraction to snake my hand across the table and lay claim to the Sauvignon Blanc. Vincent noticed, but was satisfied by throwing a vile glare in my direction. I filled both glasses and waited for him to speak.

“I used to work for them”—with a loathsome shudder on the word—“as an analyst. I tested their weapons, I crunched the numbers. I was in charge of their testing programmes. They love to test things, to experiment. You know what an obsoletion cycle is?”

I had heard of a similar phrase regarding smartphones. I had an idea, but I let him continue.

“They don’t release anything until they have the next step up. The next counter. It’s part of their policy. They refuse to release technology that they haven’t beaten themselves. The scale-dispersion vests they released last year? Highly vulnerable to their new sharding ammunition. Whatever you think they have, it’s more than that. And to fuel this, they experiment. At their core, RailTech aren’t manufacturers: they’re researchers.

“Generally the experiments run on ballistic gel. Easier, cheaper, less paperwork. But sometimes they need a field test; sometimes they need to see how something works in a real scenario. That was my domain.”

He had been drinking between sentences. His glass was empty already. I didn’t top him up.

“Things started to go bad in twenty-twelve.”

“You think?” I quipped.

Vincent coughed. I settled down.

“They were working on high-durability, high-resistance armour for troops in infected zones. The containment and sterilisation of a HAZMAT, but with the toughness of rough-terrain gear. Easier said than done, of course, but some whiz-kid managed to take the current pressure-protective model and step it up a notch. Redundancy—”

“Tubes,” I cut him off. “We’ve both seen it.”

Vincent nodded. We’d both spent some time in Africa after the fall. RailTech’s EnviroLock suit had probably saved our lives more times than either of us realised. High-pressure gel instantly sealed off breaks in the distributed breathing system. Flexible plates covered all the vulnerable points. Instead of a single oxygen tank, several smaller units were spread over the shoulders. It was an impressive piece of equipment. It wasn’t cheap. Zephyr continued.

“So, they’re testing the EnviroLock. Problem is, Red Masque victims die too quickly. It was too dangerous to live-test it in any country that survived. So what do we do?”

“Simple. You make your own victims.” I could see where this was going.

Zephyr swallowed. “We spent four months in a chopper, flying over remote parts of northern Africa. We’d find a village, or a small settlement, something that had survived. And... And we’d drop infected corpses into their water.”

He paused, waiting for a reaction. I picked my teeth. Vincent stood and started clearing the table.

I wiped my nail on Vincent’s tablecloth before responding. “I’m not going to gasp, Zephyr. And I don’t know if you noticed, but you’ve started saying ‘we’.”

His ill complexion shifted to a slightly lighter shade. “I greenlit the expedition. Not the plan. That developed when we realised our testing conditions had shifted. But I greenlit that expedition. That was me.”

“So you couldn’t take it any more? That’s original. Did your boss have a villain moustache and a cat?”

“Hey. You asked.”

“Broad strokes, Cardinal Newman. RailTech isn’t going to crumble under the weight of your backstory.”

He shot me a confused look, but I waved him on.

“I quit the moment we got back. Handed in my card and my documents and left. But somehow... Somehow, they knew. Maybe someone on my trip realised I was having major second thoughts. Maybe they just keep a contingency plan for all their employees. I don’t know.

“I saw the plume of smoke on my way home. I should have known.”

I quickly flipped through a mental scrapbook of the apartments I’d set on fire for RailTech. Not this one, probably. That would have strained the relationship.

“Your family?”

His voice cracked like fingerbones.

“Two bodies. I couldn’t even identify them: had to wait for dental records. Wife and son.”

“Only two.” I said sourly, and stared at Vincent accusingly.

Spoiler alert.

“Who were the rest?”

“My...my daughter. Her body was never found.”

Heralds of Future Agonies.

“So RailTech took your daughter? And now, two years in, now you want to do something about it? Father of the year, you are.”

Something snapped in him and he slammed his hand on the table. Vincent stood up and put a hand on his shoulder, gently, but with a threatening firmness.

“I warned you about this. Never let K Fletcher—”

              “Just Fletcher, thanks.” I chipped in.

              “—get under your skin.”

Zephyr took a breath before continuing. “I tried to do something. I went to anyone who might listen. Police, secret service, press. It looked like a gas fire, so they assumed she had just stumbled off into the night. All they could do was file a missing report and wait.”

“So. Why now?”

“Because you can help me. You’re a monster, but I think that’s exactly what I need on my side. You asked what leverage Vincent has on me? Nothing. I’m here because I want to be. I need to be.”

I liked his fervour. I also believed his story, and could see his usefulness. RailTech drew out the cruelty for too long; now they had a determined enemy where once they had a small, terrified man.

I started to speak. “If you’re going to work with me, I need to know you’re ready. You may not like me. You probably won’t like how I get things done. But that’s just it—they get done. No complaints. If someone has to get shot, or shanked, or poisoned, or lose their vocal chords to a meat cleaver, it’s because it had to happen.”

Zephyr nodded, and I continued.

“It’s been almost two years. What makes you think you can get inside?”

“I don’t know. But if we get inside, I’ll know what to look for. Get me to a computer, I’ll do the rest. There’s always that one secretary who—”

“Puts her password on a sticky note. Got it.”

Something that might have been a smile flicked over his face. Pavlova was served in the silence. Vincent seemed more relaxed.

“It’s good to see you’ve decided to play nice,” he said tentatively.

I was too busy devouring dessert to respond. Vincent playfully flicked my ear, bringing a fresh wave of pain from the ache I’d been ignoring.

“Slow down,” he cautioned. “That goes straight to the thighs.”

“Worth it. If you weren’t so good at killing people, you’d have made a world-class chef.”

“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said all month.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

I pointed my spoon at Zephyr once I’d finished.

“You. You’re coming with me.”

***

Zephyr spent the next few days with me, under a set of explicit rules. First and foremost: do not leave the first floor. He might have accepted my nature in words, but I didn’t need to explain my crimson marionette troupe. I had the blueprints of the RailTech building, but they were outdated and from 2011. I left them with Zephyr to annotate and update as his memory served.

I spent the time scouting out the building during the early afternoons and fixing cameras from vantage points. Security during the day was a matter of visibility: several guards were posted in the lobby. A further handful manned the entrance to the underground parking. At night, the patrols escalated: three men outside the building, always within vision of each other, and more sets of three navigating the inside. I counted five, maybe six groups.

“Randomised patrols,” Zephyr had said. “An algorithm dictates where guards go, and when. That ran on a central mainframe located on the twelfth floor. Whether or not it’s still there, I don’t know. By default, it accepts no incoming connections, only sends out schedules. You can pull the plug, but you’ll have to get there first.”

The guards were heavily armed and armoured. RailTech had no need to outsource some sleepy night watchman; their own mercenary divisions were well trained and well paid. This would not be like Riverside Mercy.

“If it’s as I remember, we’ll need to access the twelfth floor and the fourth. The grunts live on number four, so we’ll get access to a station there. Then, we'll need to re-route some network cables on twelfth to give me access.”

Cars still came and went from RailTech at night. They were checked, inside and underneath, by the guards at the entrance. In a sealed booth sat another, checking identity and clearance of all entrants.

A plan had taken root, choking out my brain with weed-like thoughts. There are three kinds of people in the world: the ones who run towards an explosion, the ones who run away from an explosion, and the ones who light the fuse. I placed an anonymous call to the RailTech offices through one of my disposable cellphones. An attractive voice answered, and I spent half a second wondering how it would sound through a layer of burlap.

“You’ve reached the RailTech call centre. This call may be recorded”—
perfect—
“for quality purposes. How can we assist?”

I spoke clearly and slowly:

“They Are Not The Military.”

I hung up and hurled the phone from the roof, watching the screen shatter and spray reflective chips over the street. Step one, complete. Step two involved a van, plastic explosives, and a bit of reliance on human punctuality.

***

Zephyr was both impressed and horrified at my plan. Rule two: don’t bother me with questions. He stared at my contraption before expressing his concern.

“It’s like I’m in a cartoon.”

I smirked before responding.

“Don’t discount that just yet. I’m high enough to be in one.”