Jihoon sighed. “If I’d been there with you, we wouldn’t have messed this up so badly.”
“If you’d played it straight, I wouldn’t have had to tie you up.”
“So what’s the move?”
He asked it like I was some kind of expert. Maybe compared to him I was, but what the hell could I say? Ji was supposed to be the genius. Less than a month ago, I’d been a sergeant and never did a single day in any of the academies, while looking at Jihoon, you just knew that a groomed bastard like that had been admitted to one at six years old, the earliest possible age, and probably to one of the tier-one institutes—not one of those
underfunded dust bowl academies in the reclamation districts. He hadn’t ever
seen
a civilian university. I didn’t have to ask to know that his mother had never feared being pushed into the breeding program or that his father had about a million civic award buttons pinned to his blazer lapel—to show off whenever he took a walk.
I was about to say something when Ji pointed at the holo station. We had kept it on the news, with the volume turned down, to get a heads-up if they found the murders, and now we saw the club, La Tumba, with my victims shown in three-dimensional color.
“You should have lit fire to the place,” he said.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?” But I ignored the question. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, that the old city had put its spell on me and to set it ablaze would have been a million times worse than anything else I could’ve done.
“Finish up with her,” I said.
“How?”
“Get names and addresses of her coworkers in Wonsan, information that seems innocuous, anything that might be of value down the road, like her favorite restaurants and bars, where people go to relax in her division. We can’t get anything on Sunshine, but maybe we can get something useful
now
that we won’t recognize until
later
.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I need to think.” And I knew even as I said it that thinking wouldn’t do any good at all.
The apartment had a small porch, and I lay on the concrete slab, looking up at the few stars I could see through Madrid’s light pollution. The cigarette burned.
From inside came Jihoon’s muffled shouts, and it reminded me of being a kid, of my old man hollering at my mom in their room after he came home from a twelve-hour shift at the Navy Yard, a sound sometimes accompanied by slaps. I was getting close to forty, and it worried me. There was no longevity in the Special Forces and a promotion at my age to lieutenant was only a token or something required to gain me access to Strategic Operations; it didn’t mean that they wanted me forever. So where would I be in five years? It was easy to predict the arc of someone like Ji, whose problem was being Asian. I knew he thought I was prejudiced from what I’d said to him earlier, but that couldn’t be further from the truth because I’d just been trying to piss him off, to get him to come at me, and to teach him a lesson. Most in the military didn’t trust Asians, and to those kind it wouldn’t matter that he was Korean. Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or Thai—they were the best friends we had in the Pacific. But to the military, these were the same bastards who had tricked us fifty years ago into sending our forces into one of the hairiest wars in history, the Asian Wars, where a quarter of the world’s population, along with fifty million Americans, had disappeared overnight in nuclear fire. But even that wouldn’t stop Jihoon from career advancement. You could tell from just looking at him that he had a million tricks up his sleeve.
I must be getting old,
I thought,
because I never used to think this way
.
The immediate concern, though, was La Tumba. It meant that Spanish investigators were already combing the place for hair and skin, anything that might provide a DNA sample of the killer so they could find the person who had done it. I had backup plans if they got a hit. But
none of them were optimal, and these events gave me a first taste of what it meant to be in the open, unprotected by the umbrella of the US military and operating as an independent. They
meant
it too. If we got caught, the Army would shrug it off and scream that they knew we were no good in the first place and that’s why they kicked us out. So why hadn’t I tried for these kinds of ops twenty years ago, when I was eighteen? Back then, the adrenaline would have been no more than a rush, something to savor, but there on that balcony?
It just made me think, while trying to ignore the sounds of torture from inside, and wonder:
What am I even doing on this op?
I’d been wrong when I thought that killing people would be easy; satos didn’t die like this. The Korean woman trembled in my hands, crying while she bled from her mouth, and my concentration broke when thoughts of Bea forced their way in. It pissed me off; nobody would sign up for torturing a human woman. My old assignments in war, training insurgents and fighting on the line, were a dream in comparison, and even killing satos wasn’t so bad; they didn’t whimper and cry, weren’t worth any sympathy even if they did, and although the chick was speaking Korean, you knew what she was saying and that she had a million reasons to live. Jihoon had squeezed everything he could out of her, and the local news had just announced that the police made a breakthrough in the La Tumba murders, so it was time to cut our losses and split; he was in the kitchen, finishing the last uploads of the flexi-tabs so we could burst transmit to an orbiting platform and bail.
“Kill her and get it over with,” Ji said. “Isn’t that your game?”
Another cigarette burned red. I took a few more puffs, holding the smoke in for as long as I could, and thought,
Fléchettes would be too cruel.
She would have seen me draw, and there’d be that brief moment of horror before I fired, which was an image I didn’t want burned into my brain—at least not until I had some bourbon.
She started crying more loudly, and I turned to walk back toward the coffee table. My kit rested on it. It took me a second to decide on what I wanted, but even when I lifted the injector, I couldn’t turn, didn’t want her to see the hesitation.
“Jihoon.”
“What?”
“Tell her that we’re going to put her to sleep. That when she wakes up, we’ll be gone and she can go home.”
He said something to her and then cleared his throat. “It’s done but why?”
When I turned, she saw the aeroinjector and shut her eyes. “Because it makes a difference.” I knew without looking that Ji was watching. The girl’s skin was pale, a kind of white that I recalled seeing once in Georgia, on kaolin roads that stretched forever under overhangs of willows and Spanish moss, and when the aeroinjector pressed against her neck, the skin went even whiter. She whispered something, and Jihoon started to translate, but I didn’t want to know, telling him to shut up before he could even get started. Three pulses later she was unconscious.
“The paralytic?” Jihoon asked.
“Truth serum overdose. The stuff has an opiate in it, and I gave her enough to kill an elephant.”
When it was over, I swept the area to make sure everything was in my kit, and then we both wiped down the apartment with bleach, taking anything that might have our hairs or skin—sheets, pillowcases, everything. It would be awhile before the Spanish could sift through all the DNA since there had to be thousands of other samples in such a public place as La Tumba, but we needed to be careful anyway. It hit me in a wave of dizziness. The sight of her on the floor and the twin images of Margaret and Bea both made me feel sick, the kind of sick that getting drunk would take care of, and Jihoon’s voice—his announcement that it was time to book—sounded as if it came from the other side of the world. I had to make sure. I pulled out my fléchette pistol and squeezed three rounds into her forehead before we left, before we walked down the stairs and into a rainy Madrid morning.
“You on a commercial flight?” I asked.
Jihoon nodded. “Out of Madrid. You?”
“Better if you don’t know. I’ll see you in Asia; if there’s a delay, just keep going to the meeting point every day at noon.”
We shook hands and nodded to each other before walking in separate directions.
Cameras. Street cameras, like the ones in the States but hidden to preserve the old city’s appearance, and high-altitude police drones—those had done it, allowed the cops to finger me more quickly than I’d anticipated. They’d recorded me entering and leaving La Tumba. Now my face hovered over every one of Madrid’s holo casters in a grainy portrait, just clear enough to make out my fea
tures. It was night now. I’d spent all day in the sewer, hiding with the rest of Spain’s garbage and doing my best to call the next move.
The satellite phone was cold, dripping wet as I phoned in the first report to let them know that the data was on its way and that I’d be moving out on an alternate schedule, and rain fell in sheets, in a wind so strong that it blew the drops sideways. When I finished, I smashed the phone on the concrete and then threw the pieces into the gutter. Flashing lights blinked from the direction of our flat. They turned the rain into a light show of glittering crystal, red, blue, and green, and I froze, wondering if they’d already nabbed Ji but then decided that of the two of us, he was safer since the news was describing it as the act of one psychopath. I leaned against a wall as a group of Guardia Civil jogged by, their boots pounding on the street while their officer shouted something over his helmet speakers.
Now what?
A flash of panic made my breath short, but soon the fear turned, shifted into an icy feeling that ran through my veins and refrigerated my mind so that the useless thoughts froze and fell out, leaving the logical options, the ones for which I had been trained. So far I had evaded capture. But the Guardia and Madrid’s police would be ready at checkpoints, waiting to find the person who matched the holo image, or if they had found any DNA, the sequence that fit. For now, my appearance would be hard to match given the fact that I was soaked and visibility in the rain was bad anyway. And there were things I could do about DNA, but by now they would have matched my description to my entry visa profile. This last possibility wasn’t a problem either, in theory, because it
was possible to counteract a visa match, involving a method that allowed me to adopt any one of ten identity chits I carried.
But it would hurt like hell.
My shoes slipped on the wet cobblestones when I ducked into an alley, and in the distance a dim blue light shone over a door. I took three steps down to it. The tired Spaniard manning the bar’s entrance smelled of tobacco, and he looked me up and down before waving me into a low-ceilinged chamber where white smoke obscured the far side of the room, and I leaned over to ask him in broken Spanish for the toilet. The guy pointed and I moved. Once inside a stall with the door locked, my duffel didn’t want to open until I nearly ripped the zipper off, reaching inside a concealed pocket to find my extra passport chits and a pair of special pens that hid things I’d hoped to avoid using—because there wouldn’t be any anesthesia. Both pens were microbot injectors: One would release a set of invisible automatons, programmed to arrange themselves under the skin of a finger where, if subjected to a skin prick, they would release DNA. The bots in the other pen would rearrange my retinal capillaries and alter their pattern. Both signatures would match the next passport. The finger injection wasn’t so bad, an instant of pain as the bots spread and pushed tissues aside, but I hoped that if asked for a sample, they would let me choose the digit because the wrong finger would end everything.
My eyes were another issue entirely. I did both, one after another, and the pain almost made me pass out; my eye sockets burned from the inside and tears blinded me so that at first it wasn’t apparent that they consisted of blood instead of water, and although there was no scream
ing, someone in the next stall would have heard a soft moaning that no amount of effort could have prevented. When it was over, I could barely see.
Then it was a matter of time. Someone came into the stall next to mine, and I waited, making sure that he sat down before I broke in—slamming my fist into his face, again and again, until he fell unconscious—and stripped him of his clothes. They were big but would have to do. Once I’d finished I dumped all of mine into the trash can, flushed my old passport chit down the toilet, and walked out. The new clothes weren’t a perfect solution, but if—in addition to a finger prick—they sampled my clothing, at least for a while the DNA would be someone else’s. Outside, I jumped into a cab and told the driver to head for the Atocha train station. The clock was ticking now; although my eyes would be altered forever, the microbots in my fingers had a half-life of two days.
“British?” the cabbie asked.
“American.”
“Ah, we used to get a lot of Americans when the war was on, but now not so much.”
“Yeah. I can understand that.”
“Where are you going, the train to Barcelona?”
Before I could answer he cursed in Spanish, and the cab slowed, its electric motor whining. “La Guardia,” he explained. “The cops. They have traffic blocked all over the area.”
I did my best to look concerned—which wasn’t difficult—glancing at my watch in frustration. “Oh? What do they want? I have a train in an hour; do you think I’ll miss it?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
He laughed and looked back at me. “On if you’re the one they want to catch. It shouldn’t take long. A test here, a test there, and then through.”