“And if anyone knows what the Chinese are up to,” the admiral said, “Chen knows. The chit also has a series of phone numbers and a timetable, so you can keep us posted on your progress. When you call, you’ll get a voice mail service, on which you’ll leave a series of code words. Memorize those too.”
“Questions?” Momson asked.
Now it made sense. There would be no capture and return for this one since nobody wanted to admit that one of our own had turned, that the military had failed to keep an eye on a key scientist who turned traitor. I guessed that killing a human, a real person, wouldn’t be so hard. What the hell else was I good at? To me, Chen would be just like executing satos, and once you got over the first one, the rest were easy, but there was something different about Margaret. Maybe it was the tattoos. I couldn’t help thinking that she had looked more human than I was used to, like she could’ve been Bea when we first met. This one had bleached her hair blonde, and even though the tattoos were grotesque, maybe the worst of prison ink I’d ever seen, it suggested that she cared about things, was unique and didn’t want to be what she was, wanted to be different. Margaret made me shiver because she wasn’t a hundred percent machine and because she wasn’t a person either.
My CO rested his hand on my shoulder. “Grab the girl first. Alive. She’ll be easier to access, and with the right motivation could give you what you need.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
The admiral nodded. “You’ll be getting a new partner. We’ve arranged for transport for you to Spain, where he’ll give you a preliminary assignment that could be related, after which both of you will move on to Bangkok to a prearranged meeting place. I know Spain is in the opposite direction, but we can’t tell you why it’s important because we don’t have all the details yet, and hopefully your partner will have it worked out by the time you get there.”
“What’s his name?”
Momson looked down, and I could tell that they
weren’t going to answer.
What the fuck did it matter?
“No names for now; he’ll contact you first. Hotel and address are on the chit, so just go there and wait. You’re right; this isn’t the kind of mission you’ve been trained for, Bug, so you need this guy.”
I stood, making sure that my face remained expressionless, that it wouldn’t show any rage—
what did they mean a new partner?
—slid the chit into my uniform breast pocket, and headed out. I didn’t want another partner, least of all someone not of my choosing. It was an insult. An unforgivable insertion into what had always customarily been the special operator’s choosing; nobody ever gave you a partner you didn’t ask for.
“One last thing,” the colonel said, as if he had read my mind. “The new partner isn’t negotiable. If anything happens—like you two get accidentally separated or he winds up dead in Madrid—we’re pulling the plug. You need this guy, Resnick; for one thing he’ll be your linguist, and for another thing he’s a lot smarter than either you or me. A genius.” And before the elevator door shut, I heard the admiral ask what
sato
meant.
“Sir,” the colonel answered, “it’s Puerto Rican slang, meaning a street dog, a homeless person. It’s what my boys call escaped genetics.”
“Well, then, what the hell is Bug?”
“Resnick’s call sign. The lieutenant designed his own armor with an integrated sniffer and microbot receiver on the front of his helmet; it makes him look like a wasp.
So…
Bug.”
I called it the freeze. It was the worst part of a mission, the early stage of operations where there was no hunt and all
you could do was wait and contemplate the million things that could go wrong and the million ways to get out. Once planning and preparation were complete, there was nothing left to consider; things just played. I’d never found the right words for the inevitable feeling that came with it, and “depression” didn’t describe the sensation because it wasn’t a feeling of sadness as much as it was a feeling of nothing, of emptiness and a cold vacancy in your chest.
A half-finished tortilla and a mug of coffee sat on my table, and I stared at them, trying to remember the last time I had been excited about anything except the job.
Couldn’t.
The war had turned me into a death junkie, always thinking about the next one, that jazzed feeling when you first saw the target and knew that in a while she’d be gone at your hand, the perfection of completing a cycle started by God himself and improved on by man. Someone asked me once what they were like, and I said, “who?”
“Genetics, man, what are they like, and what’s it like to wipe one?”
I just shrugged—because if he knew who Phillip’s father was and what they manufactured in Winchester, he wouldn’t have asked—and told him to go find one and see for himself since to me it was like putting a bullet in your refrigerator or car; there was nothing to it except that your refrigerator didn’t fight as hard as these things did.
But Margaret doesn’t look like them.
I had no idea why that simple fact put a shimmy in me, why it screwed up my whole process and made me doubt.
I stubbed out a cigarette and leaned over, picking up the binoculars again to make sure Madrid’s Plaza Mayor hadn’t changed. There would be hookers against the north wall, near the alleys; it had been the same for the last
three days. Guardia Civil patrolled regularly, their arrival times random, so if we ever found what we were looking for, we’d have to just chance it on the fly, hope that nothing the Civil saw zapped them into consciousness. During the day, Madrid was like any other city. People worked, ran from place to place, or dropped off and picked up their kids from school, ignorant of the luxuries they had compared to Kazakhstan—or any third-world meat hole—and indifferent to their luck, that, unlike Sydney, the city hadn’t turned into some massive refugee camp for east Asians. People smiled, something that I hadn’t seen in a long time; part of me dug it, but another part of me wanted to burn the place down and give them a taste of what the rest of the world had dealt with.
The plaza was packed. With our window open the afternoon breeze wafted in, bringing with it something that made me uneasy, and at first I couldn’t put my finger on it, a smell that turned the whole thing ridiculous, the cherry on a sundae that had been constructed by elements antithetical to all my experiences.
To be in a city like Madrid.
Everyone was happy and had no idea that there was a killer looking down on them, someone who didn’t give a shit about anything, and eventually I identified the scent that had been bothering me:
gofre
vendors had filled the square with the smell of waffles and chocolate. I was about to laugh when my new partner woke up.
“Anything?” he asked.
I looked at him without answering. Jihoon Kim. He went by Ji and was several inches shorter than me, and the first time we’d met he’d been dressed like a Spaniard—with dark pants, a blue shirt, and black patent leather shoes—like some sort of reincarnation of a Franco loyal
ist.
An Asian punk.
Half my age, the guy had straight hair all military black, clean-cut, and so short that I winced at the fact that he screamed Army.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. The plaza is the same as yesterday. That’s some great information you got, Ji, we shoulda seen something by now; maybe we should scrub the op and head out to Bangkok.”
“No. The information was good. We do Madrid my way, the rest of it is yours.”
I didn’t like it. The guy played it close, wouldn’t give me any details about what we were doing there, only that two Koreans would be meeting in the plaza and that from there we needed to track them, to find out where they went next. It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with one piece. At first I’d thought about decking him when he refused to give me more information, but he showed me the orders, and that just made me sick—that for some reason I wasn’t to be trusted with anything more than what Ji deemed necessary.
“What did you do before the Army?” I asked while scanning the plaza. “Before Special Forces.”
“The Bureau. Assurance and Investigation.”
“Are you shitting me? BAI?”
He laughed. We had rented a tiny flat near the edge of the plaza in a new housing unit that was tall enough to give a good view. Ji shuffled over to its kitchen and ran water over his hands to wash his face.
“It’s true. I left the bureau two years ago to join Special Forces. I wanted to get in the field, and this is my first operation.”
I nearly dropped the binoculars and looked at him. “You ever fired a weapon in anger? Been shot at?”
He toweled off and shook his head.
“Then what did you
do
for the bureau?”
“Linguist. A translator and analyst for the Domestic Assurance Service, where the major city information systems link.”
“So you were part of the central computer system. Monitoring the lives and conversations of innocent people. You got paid to be a Peeping Tom.”
Ji’s face went red. “Our job was to
protect
people. We got tip-offs from the semi-awares, but the semis only pinged us if they had serious information; they screen out anything that isn’t important.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”
We stared at each other, and hatred flooded into my chest; this guy was nothing. I didn’t hate him because he was Asian, but because he had taken Wheezer’s place and had no right to, hadn’t even shown that he could hack it, but they’d given him to me and just that was enough to make me want to put my fist through his teeth. And knowing that he had been one of the nameless watchers, waiting for alerts from the central system, the voice in my kitchen that reported when we used too many resources or the fact that Bea’s voice had reached a certain decibel level…
I picked up the field glasses and went back to watching the plaza. “You’re a piece of shit.”
“Excuse me?” Ji’s voice trembled, and I didn’t have to look to know he was pissed.
“A piece of shit. And to make it worse you’re a lousy sack of a Chinaman, and all you BAI guys are the same: perverts who get their rocks off by watching and listening while normal Americans climb in the sack with their girlfriends or wives or whatever. You make me freakin’ sick.
You know one of the reasons I like to get in the field, why I liked Kazakhstan and all the ’Stans so much? It was because out there if I wanted to be alone, unmonitored, all I had to do was flip a few switches. But I can’t even get privacy in my own home because of stinking asswipes like you.”
I heard him coming. As soon as he was in range, I stood and slammed the binoculars into his face, at the bridge of his nose, and the crack echoed through the room. When he started to fall, it was easy to sidestep, to move over and let him crumple to the floor with both hands clenched to his face and blood turning them red.
“You son of a bitch!”
I kicked him in the stomach until he doubled over, then did it again. “What’s the mission?”
“Screw you.”
“Look, Ji, you don’t know me, and I don’t like you at all. And I’m guessing that, like me, you’ve been stripped of any connection to the Army, which means you’re a civilian now and pretty much on your own.” As I spoke, I took off my belt and then kicked him again, reaching down to force his arms behind his back so I could tie them. “You don’t know half of what I’ve seen.”
It was true. Wheezer would have recognized the look in my eyes and heard the tone of my voice and just known that this was my zone, a job; that although I wasn’t a collector, I knew how to dig information from satos; and that to me, Ji was no different, a piece of meat attached to a meat cog, attached to a bigger meat machine that had over time become something loathsome but necessary if I wanted a paycheck. If Jihoon had known all that, he would have just told me what I wanted to know—would
have known that his life was in danger. It took a second to rip a leg off the chair I had been sitting on and a minute to rip padding off the couch and fasten it around my makeshift club, to soften it just enough and make sure the thing wouldn’t kill him right away.
“What’s the op?” I asked again. “Give me the details.”
His voice was muffled now and wet with blood. “Go to hell.”
It took about five minutes. Jihoon screamed with the blows, each one placed to cause the most pain without doing permanent damage, during which time I didn’t ask for anything. When he was ready, the beating stopped.
Ji was sobbing. “You mother…”
“What’s the op? Tell me, and it all goes away.”
“You’re just going to kill me.”
I lit a cigarette and sat cross-legged on the floor next to him. “Why would I do that? I need you for the next leg of the mission and killing you would just make the Army come after me. I love the Army. Just tell me what the op is, and we can move on; think of this as an initiation to a brotherhood of psychopaths.”
He coughed for a few minutes. When the cigarette went out, I sighed and stood, getting ready for the next phase, having to admit that the guy was tougher than I thought and that maybe he’d have to die after all.
“OK, Ji. It just hurts more from here on out, though.”
“Sunshine,” he said. I sat again and shifted his body so I could hear more clearly.
“What about it? What is it?”
“Unified Korea is starting its own genetics program in response to an outside threat, probably from the Chinese, but we don’t know for sure; all we know is that Chen is
connected to it. I sold Command on the idea that we could get information from the Korean side of the equation that might link with what we know of Margaret and Dr. Chen, so we’d run
my
op first. My way.”