Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (7 page)

“What did she say?”

“Well, she offered to kill people for me. And that ‘Kitty did a bad thing,’ but that she didn’t think Kitty had made it out of the house. I don’t know whether she was talking about a pet or a person, but—” I stopped talking. Tessa was sitting suddenly ramrod straight, her eyes gone wide in their circles of club makeup, her mouth gone suddenly slack with something that might be shock, or might be plain and simple fear. “Tessa? You want to tell me what you just figured out? Because honestly, I’m getting a little tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

“You’re sure she said ‘Kitty.’ She didn’t use some other word, or a proper name.”

“No, she said ‘Kitty.’ She said it multiple times, she was very clear.” The status bar turned blue and then disappeared. “See for yourself, you should have the file now.”

“Hang on.” Tessa bent her head and started to type. I heard my own voice through her computer speakers, distorted by distance and compression. We always sound strange to ourselves when heard in playback. This was especially strange. I might not have recognized myself, if not for the mystery woman’s voice speaking a second later, answering me, confirming the provenance of the file. Tessa began shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Nyet. No.”

“What?” I tapped on my computer screen, hoping the noise and motion together would be enough to catch her attention. “Tessa,
what
? You can’t freak out without inviting me to your ‘everything is ruined forever’ party. It’s not nice, and it’s not productive. What’s wrong? Why are you trying to refute reality? Refuting reality never works out in the long run, trust me.”

“This woman…I may know who she is.” Tessa looked up, shaking her head again. “I think she used to work with the competition. A man from Seattle, who did the kind of work I do, but I will be honest: he was better than I will ever be. I have more patience for legwork, I am happier to look for missing people and use the skills I have, but this man? He could wipe you from the world if you told him where to start. He could build an identity out of nothing, put a person in cracks that no one even realized were there until they might as well have existed all along. He was an artist.”

“What happened to him?”

“What happens to all the artists in this world? He died.” She kept typing, her eyes fixed at a point below the level of her webcam. I could see the roots of her hair, dark brown showing through her carefully cultivated blonde. “The community was in an uproar for months. Some people even said it was a hoax, that he was doing the ultimate ID scrub and scrubbing himself right out of reality. Nobody knows for sure. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. They look legit to me, but what do I know? I’m no doctor.”

“Besides, they could have autopsied a clone.” Tessa’s head snapped up, eyes even wider this time. I shrugged. “What? I did physiological examinations of the second Georgia Mason, remember? Clone tech is more advanced than we like to think it is, especially when you don’t need your clone to do anything but die. Let me tell you, that doesn’t take any special skills.” Anybody could die. It was almost the only thing that every person on Earth had been designed to do with equal proficiency.

“I didn’t even think of that.” She bowed her head as she resumed typing. “They called him ‘the Monkey.’ If he had a real name, he scrubbed it years ago—maybe before he did anything else. The best always experiment on themselves, you know? Means you have time to be sure that whatever it is you’re doing really
works
, that it’s not just chance. He had the resources to get himself a clone, if he really wanted one. If he needed to disappear.”

“This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with my mystery woman?” I asked.

“He always lived with at least two women. They were…let’s call them his ‘public relations team.’ That’s what you call your lovers who sometimes kill people for you, right?” Tessa’s scowl was visible only in the way her cheeks distorted, tightening and pulling at the sides of her face. “A friend of mine worked for him for a while. He deleted her whole original identity, just wrote her out of the world and wrote her back in as part of his private menagerie. He called her ‘the Wolf,’ and when she fell out of favor, he deleted that identity, too. We’ve never found her body. I don’t think we ever will.” She was still typing, more fiercely now, like she thought she could bring her friend back from the dead through sheer force of anger.

“So what? You think our guest was one of the Monkey’s girls?”

“The last two recorded members of his little zoo were ‘the Cat’ and ‘the Fox.’ A hacker and a killer, according to all reports.” Tessa glanced up. “The Cat’s body was recovered at the same time as the Monkey’s. The Fox’s body never was.”

I paused. “I know why I’ve heard that name before. The Masons went to the Monkey. He was supposed to get them new identities. Instead, he fucked around and nearly got them all killed. Shaun really hated that guy.” Had he mentioned women working for the Monkey? I felt as if he had, at least once, at least in passing. He’d been a little distracted by the time he and the others made it back down the coast to me—something about finding his dead sister reborn in a CDC holding facility had taken his mind off things he would have once considered to be of the utmost importance.

“Well, your Shaun may have had good reason. This woman seems really fixated on the idea that someone she calls Kitty ‘did a bad thing.’ If that bad thing involved your friends, that could explain why things went so sour at the Monkey’s place.”

“That would make the woman I have the Fox, correct?” When Tessa nodded, so did I. “All right, keep digging, and if you find
anything
, I want to know about it. I’m going to drop a line to the folks I still know at After the End Times, and see if any of them can confirm your ID.”

“If they do, let me know, okay? Finding the last of the Monkey’s girls would be a pretty big deal in the circles I move in.” I must have made a face, because Tessa put her hands up, and said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone where she was until after she’s not with you, I swear. I value your business, and I value you not sending people to close my mouth permanently. I’m not going to go spilling your secrets all over the Internet just because I want to look cool for my friends.”

“I pay you for secrecy,” I said coldly. “Just remember that.” Then I killed the connection, before she could make any more excuses. If there was any chance at all that our guest was worth something to someone, getting a confirmed ID had just become even more important. And now I had to do it before Tessa did.

“I hate subcontractors,” I muttered, and reached for the phone.

It’s possible to maintain a landline in today’s day and age, and there are even reasons that it can be considered superior to having a cell phone, if you do it right. Old phone cables run through the entire North American continent, laced through earth and stone like veins through the human body. Most of them haven’t been used, or consistently monitored, in decades. One person with a decent understanding of how they work and a few skills picked up from an old telephone company repair manual can set up safe, secure, off-the-grid communications. It’s kind of funny, in a sideways sort of way: People used to go for burn phones and cell blockers, thinking that they were keeping themselves secure, and now those same people would kill their own mothers for a black market landline and the tech to keep it clean.

I held the receiver between my cheek and shoulder as I typed, listening to the ringing. Finally, the line clicked, and an amiable female voice announced, “Kwong-Garcia residence, Maggie speaking.”

“Tick tock says the clock, when the watch runs down,” I said.

There was a pause. “I don’t really like this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, okay? I’ve got a scrambler on the line, courtesy of Daddy, so if you’re calling for Alaric or whatever, you can stop with the weird code phrases and the pretending that this sounds even remotely normal. It doesn’t. Anyone who happens to be in the room with me would know something was up if I gave you the countersign, so how about we just don’t?”

“When did your father get you a scrambler good enough to trust?” I asked.

“It was a wedding gift,” said Maggie. “Dr. Abbey? Is that you?”

“It’s me,” I confirmed. “Congratulations on that, by the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. You know how it is. Underground virologist, fugitive from the law, all that.”

“We really liked the KitchenAid you sent,” said Maggie. “I would’ve sent you a thank-you note, but we didn’t so much have a mailing address.”

“I was thanked in spirit,” I said. “Is Alaric around? I need to ask him some questions.”

“He’s working right now, but I can get him if it’s important.” Maggie paused. “What am I saying? You
picked up a phone
. This isn’t just important, it’s cause for a ticker tape parade.”

“I don’t think they have those anymore,” I said dryly. “As to the rest, I take your point, and will try to be in touch more often, if only so you don’t decide to mount some sort of expedition to my place of work and take me out. Now, can you please put Alaric on the phone?”

“Just a second.” There was a soft click as she put the phone on mute. That was something I actually missed from working at the Canadian branch of the CDC. We had all used heavy handset phones, holdovers from the pre-Rising world that could be hit with a hammer and still function. With those, putting down the phone would invariably make a loud clunking sound, keeping everyone aware of what was happening around them. I didn’t trust phones that could be put on mute. They created too much opportunity for plotting.

A few seconds passed before the line beeped, and Alaric’s familiar voice said, “Dr. Abbey? Is that really you?”

“You should learn to trust your wife,” I said. “She said it was me. Ergo, it was me. Why is that so difficult to believe?”

“Because you never call. You write sometimes, but you never, ever call. Not even when we got married. You sent a fancy blender via courier. It would’ve been nice to hear your voice.”

“You’re hearing it now, and all you’re doing is complaining about it.” I sighed. “It’s nice to talk to you, too, Alaric. Now, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

“What?” Alaric sounded genuinely baffled for a moment. His tone turned quickly wary as he continued, asking, “Why do you want to know? Why are you calling me?”

“Because I can’t call Mahir—it’s too difficult to synchronize time zones, and even voice over IP is risky when you’re bouncing it between continents. No one has a number for the Masons. Becks is dead. That leaves you.”

“No, not just me. Hold on.” There was a soft scuffing sound; he hadn’t put the phone on mute, he had put his hand over the receiver. “Maggie! Come in here, and bring the splitter.” The scuffing sound was repeated, and his voice was suddenly back in my ear. “Maggie’s getting the headphone splitter. You need to talk to both of us. Her because she has data, me because I’m not going to sit here eavesdropping in my own home.”

“I love how suddenly my actions are being dictated to me,” I said sourly. “Why am I talking to Maggie, and not to you? You’re the Newsie. She writes smut for a living.”

“I write excellent, extremely literate erotica, thank you very much,” said Maggie primly, her voice coming through as clearly as her husband’s. “It pays more of the bills than his reporting ever will, so you should respect the pornography.”

“Your father pays all your bills,” I said, without rancor. “Since Alaric says I should be talking to you, what can you tell me about the Monkey and his girls?”

“He was a controlling narcissist who didn’t allow for any resistance or deviation from the relatively narrow roles he dictated for the women who came into his orbit,” said Maggie without hesitation. “He’d had extensive plastic surgery at some point:
No one
looks that generic unless they’ve designed themselves to look that way. I wish I’d been able to get the number for his surgeon. That work was amazing.”

“You’re perfect just the way you are,” said Alaric. “You don’t need a plastic surgeon.”

“Maybe I don’t right now, but it’s always good to have a few numbers on file,” said Maggie serenely. “I may want to cover the scars on my stomach someday. Pancake makeup and concealer are good for a lot, and yet sometimes I’d like to be able to hot tub without tinting the water beige.”

“This is a fascinating conversation, and I’m just thrilled beyond words to be able to be an unwilling participant, but can we please get back on track?” I asked. “I need to know about the Monkey’s girls. I understand that he had two. Can either of you describe them for me?”

“The Cat was tall, thin, brown hair, cold eyes. She did a lot of the grunt work for him. I get the feeling she was a computer genius, but I didn’t get details,” said Maggie.

“Her name was Jane,” said Alaric. His voice was much more subdued. “We dated for a while back in college. She was always a little cold, but I figured that was just the sort of person she was, you know? Not everyone is physically demonstrative.”

“The sex was apparently amazing,” said Maggie. “Seriously transcendent. I
did
get details about that, but to be fair, I asked for them. The woman should’ve written a book on fucking, instead of going into the business of fucking people over.”

“I am thrilled to be learning more about the intricacies of your marriage, and will send you my therapy bills,” I said flatly.

“I’m good for them,” said Maggie.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “So that’s the Cat. Jane. I’ve heard reports that she didn’t make it out of the Monkey’s compound alive.” Even if she had, she wasn’t the woman in my observation room. My guest could have been a natural brunette, and she could have had cold eyes when she wasn’t drugged to the gills, but no one, however charitable, was ever going to call her “tall.” I’d met taller teenagers. “There was another woman, though. Tell me about her.”

“You mean Foxy?” asked Maggie. “She was little. Red hair. Blue eyes. Violent as all hell. She seemed like she was only really
happy
when she was hurting something—although she was the one who really got upset when we found out that the Cat had betrayed us. The Monkey was angry when he found out. But the Fox was sad. She was disappointed. It was sort of like she was a little kid in some ways, and she didn’t want to believe that the people who were important to her could actually do anything that was really wrong.”