Текст книги "Lock in"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Nineteen

AN HOUR WITH the Loudoun County sheriffs, who seemed delighted to buy into the “home robbery gone wrong” story. I left just as the media, and Dad’s media people, started to arrive. That was something they could handle. At some point I would need the FBI to take possession of Skow’s body, because I needed to confirm what was in his head. I would worry about that later.

My threep in D.C. was where I had left it, and had a police guard, although whether it was a guard or a cop waiting to arrest me wasn’t clear for the first couple of minutes. A diagnostic showed that the damage to the threep from the bullet into the back was worse than I originally thought, and I had a couple of hours before it locked up entirely. I reflected on the fact that in a single day I had managed to seriously damage three separate threeps.

An hour arguing with Trinh and the Metro police about having Rees’s body released to the FBI. The point that Rees had just attempted to assassinate an FBI agent did not seem to convince Trinh all that much. Finally had to resort to having people over my head at the Bureau go over her head in the Metro police. By the time I was done Trinh no longer wanted to be my friend, ever. Suited me.

Another hour with the FBI recounting the Rees attack, making up a suitable lie about leaving the scene to check in on my parents and otherwise catching up my place of employment with the day’s events. I focused on the Rees attack, rather than the whole day. Did not volunteer to speculate on causes, and no one asked me to. For now Rees’s attack was being treated like a single event, unrelated to anything else me and Vann were doing. This also suited me.

Finished up just as my threep ground to a halt. Managed to get to my desk. I would have to schedule for the local Sebring-Warner dealership to pick it up for repair tomorrow. In the meantime I checked the inventory for visitor threeps I could use.

There were none. We had called in reinforcements for the march. Visiting agents were borrowing the five threeps we had on hand. Fine, I thought, and started looking for rentals.

There were none. The march meant that every rental threep in the District, Maryland, and Northern Virginia was rented through Monday. The closest rental threep available was in Richmond. It was a Metro Junior Courier.

“The hell with this,” I said, and finally exercised my rich-person privileges. I called up my Sebring-Warner salesman on his personal number and told him that if he could get to his store and have a threep ready for me in forty-five minutes, I would pay full price plus an extra five thousand as a tip for dragging him out of whatever Adams-Morgan singles pit he was currently casting about in.

An hour later I walked out of the D.C. Sebring-Warner dealership in a 325K—a few steps down from the 660XS but at this point it seemed likely I would have it for about a day before I completely trashed it in the line of duty—and took a cab to Georgetown Hospital, calling Vann to let her know I was on my way, and in a new threep.

I found her in the emergency room, arm in a sling, arguing with an orderly.

“We need to have you in the wheelchair until you exit the building,” he said.

“I was shot in the shoulder, not the legs,” she said.

“It’s hospital policy.”

“I can’t move this arm, but the rest of me works fine, so if you want to try to stop me, see where it gets you. The good news is, you’re already at the hospital.” She walked off, leaving the annoyed orderly behind.

“Vann,” I said.

She looked over at me, taking in the new threep. “Shane?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Prove it.”

“I royally pissed off Trinh tonight,” I said. “I think she hates me more than she hates you.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Vann said. “But if you got her even halfway there I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“Good,” Vann said. “Then you buy me a drink. Come on. I know a bar.”

“I don’t really think you should be hitting the bars tonight,” I said. “You have a hole in your shoulder.”

“It’s a scratch,” Vann said.

“A hole in your shoulder from a bullet,” I said.

“It was a small bullet,” Vann said.

“Fired by someone trying to kill you.”

“All the more reason I need a drink.”

“No bars,” I said.

Vann looked at me sourly.

“Let’s go back to my place,” I said.

“Why would I want to do that,” Vann said.

“Because we have to catch up,” I said. “And because there are agents there watching over the place, so you won’t be killed in the night. I have a couch you can sleep on.”

Vann continued to look unconvinced.

“And we’ll stop on the way to get a bottle of something,” I said.

“Better,” she said.

*   *   *

I entered my town house with my public ID up so that my housemates wouldn’t panic when they saw me. Tayla came over and stopped when she looked at Vann.

“They let you out,” she said.

“It’s more like I didn’t let them keep me in,” Vann said.

Even without facial expression I could sense disapproval radiating from Tayla, but then she let it go. “You two need to access the news,” she said.

“I’m not sure about that,” I said.

“They have a video message from Brenda Rees,” she said. “It went live on the net just before she shot at Agent Vann.” She pointed to the living room. “We have a monitor there for guests.”

“I have my glasses,” Vann said, but we went into the living room anyway, fired up the monitor to the news channel, which had a copy of Rees’s video. In the video she talked about the injustice of Abrams-Kettering, how it was causing suffering among so many of her clients, and how everyone was to blame. “There are no innocents among the non-Hadens,” she said. “They allowed this to happen. Cassandra Bell said it, and I believe it: This is a war on a disabled minority. Well, I am now a soldier in this war. And for me the battle starts tonight.”

“Do you believe this?” Vann asked me, as we watched the video again.

“Hell, no,” I said.

“You caught the reference to Cassandra Bell.”

“I did. Another act of violence, ostensibly perpetrated at her behest.”

“Anyone killed tonight?” Vann asked.

“Aside from Rees?” I asked. Vann nodded. “No. There were some people who were stampeded and other injuries, and property damage from the grenade. But the only person she shot at was you.”

“And you,” Vann said.

“I got hit,” I said. “But that was because I was protecting you.”

“And that would go against her story anyway,” Vann said. “So you and I know she was gunning for me but her story will muddy up the waters. When the morning shows go live tomorrow, they’re going to tie this into the Loudoun Pharma attack.”

“That sounds about right to me,” I said.

Vann didn’t say anything to this, but touched the monitor to bring up the latest news. The top story aside from Rees’s attack was the shooting at my parents’ house. Vann pulled up the story and watched it.

“A burglar,” Vann said, after the report ended.

“That’s what I told my parents to say.”

“Think it will float?”

“There’s no reason for it not to,” I said.

“How are your parents?” Vann asked.

“Now that they’ve got their people and responses in place they’ll be fine,” I said. “Dad’s in shock a little. Killing a man ends any thought of him running for Senate.”

“A man defending his home doesn’t play so poorly in most parts of Virginia,” Vann said.

“No, but it’s balanced out by the image of a really big angry black man with a shotgun,” I said. “Even Mom’s ancestors being gun runners for the Confederacy isn’t going to make up for that. So I’m pretty sure a party rep is going to come around tomorrow and tell him they would be delighted for him to endorse the candidacy of someone else.”

“Sorry.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Eventually. Dad’s probably got a week of think pieces and commentary about him and the shooting to get through before he can do anything else. A normal person would be able to get through it in private. Dad has to worry about what it means for his legacy.”

“And the ‘burglar,’” Vann said.

“A Navajo named Bruce Skow,” I said.

“And he’s like Johnny Sani.”

“As far as we can tell so far, probably,” I said. “We’ll need to get into his head to confirm.”

“Another remote-controlled Integrator,” Vann said.

“Looks like,” I said.

Vann sighed and then pointed at the liquor store bag I still held in my hand, containing a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a package of Solo cups. “Pour me some of that,” she said. “Make it a tall one.”

“How tall?” I asked.

“Don’t get me drunk,” Vann said. “But just short of that would be fine.”

I nodded. “Why don’t you head up to my room,” I said. “I’ll bring it up to you in a minute.” I pointed in the right direction and then went into the kitchen, which was a characteristically bare Haden kitchen, save for the pallets of nutritional liquid.

Tayla, whose room was on the first floor, saw me go in and followed. “You’re getting her a drink,” she said.

“The alternative to getting her one here was getting her one at a bar,” I said. “At least here I can cut her off if she gets sloppy.”

“What she really needs at this point is some sleep, not bourbon,” she said, pointing to the bottle.

“I’m not going to disagree with you on that,” I said, opening the bottle. “But she’s not going to do that at the moment. In which case I might as well make her comfortable because we need to do some work.”

“And how are you doing?” Tayla asked.

“Well, you know,” I said, opening the Solo cup package. “Today I fought with a ninja threep, saw two women view the last video from a dead relative, had a woman explode twenty feet from me, and watched my dad kill an intruder with a shotgun.” I took a cup and poured the bourbon into it. “If I had any sense I’d take this bottle and attach it to my intake tube.”

“I’ve seen people do that, actually,” Tayla said.

“Yeah?” I asked. “How does it work for them?”

“About as well as you’d expect,” Tayla said. “Haden bodies are sedentary and in general have low alcohol tolerances to start. Our digestive systems are used to taking in nutritional liquids, not actual food and drink. And then there’s the fact that the disease changes our brain structure, which for a lot of Hadens increases the propensity for addiction.”

“So they’re all fucked up, is what you’re saying.”

“What I’m saying is there’s nothing as fucked up as a Haden alcoholic.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

“You need sleep too,” Tayla said. “Professional opinion.”

“I’m not going to disagree with you on that, either,” I said. “But for all the reasons I’ve just outlined, I’m a little wired right now.”

“Is it always like this?” Tayla asked.

“My job?”

“Yes.”

“This is my first week on the job,” I said. “So, so far? Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Like I wish I had decided to be the typical rich kid and been a sponge on my parents,” I said.

“You don’t really mean that,” Tayla said.

“No,” I said. “But at the moment I really want to feel like I did.”

Tayla came over and rested a hand on my arm. “I’m the house doctor,” she said. “If you need help you know where I am.”

“I do,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep tonight.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay.” She turned to go.

“Tayla,” I said. “Thanks for tonight. It means a lot to me that you helped my partner.”

“That’s my job,” Tayla said. “I mean, you saw me help a man who two minutes earlier was planning to bash my head in with a bat. I wouldn’t do any less for someone you care about.”

Chapter Twenty

“YOU TOOK YOUR time,” Vann said, as I walked into the room.

“Tayla wanted to talk,” I said, walking the bourbon over to her. “She’s worried about the both of us.”

“Seems fair,” Vann said, taking the cup. “Both of us survived an assassination attempt tonight. I’m worried about the both of us too.” She took a sip from the cup. “Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“I thought we were saving story time until after the march,” I said.

“We were,” Vann said. “But then your friend Tony showed up with his discovery, and then someone tried to put a bullet into my head. So I’ve decided that sooner is better than later for story time.”

“All right,” I said.

“This is going to wander a bit,” Vann warned.

“I’m all right with that,” I said.

“I’m forty,” Vann said. “I was sixteen when I got sick. This was during the first wave of infections, when they were still figuring out what the hell to do about it. I lived in Silver Spring and there was a party I wanted to go to with friends in Rockville, but Rockville was quarantined because there was a Haden’s outbreak. I didn’t care, because I was sixteen and stupid.”

“Like any sixteen-year-old,” I said.

“Exactly. So me and my friends got into a car, found a way in that didn’t have a roadblock on it, and went to the party. No one at the party looked sick to me when we got there, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I finally got back home around three and my dad was waiting for me. He thought I was drunk and asked me to breathe so he could smell my breath. I coughed on him like an asshole and then I went to bed.”

Vann paused to take another sip out of her cup. I waited for what I knew was coming next.

“Three days later I felt like my entire body had swelled. I had a temperature, I was raspy, my head hurt. Dad was feeling the same way. My mother and my sister felt fine, so my dad told them to go over to her sister’s so she wouldn’t get sick.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. They had probably been infected but weren’t showing symptoms yet. That’s how Haden’s spread as far as it did.

“No,” Vann agreed. “But this was early days so they were still trying to figure these things out. They left and Dad and I watched TV and drank coffee and waited to feel better. After a couple of days we both thought the worst was over.”

“And then the meningitis hit,” I said.

“And then the meningitis hit. I thought my head was going to explode. My father called 911 and told them what was going on. They came to our house in hazmat suits, grabbed us, and sent us over to Walter Reed, which is where second-stage Haden’s victims were sent. I was there for two weeks. I almost died right at the beginning. They pumped some experimental serum in me that gave me a seizure. I tensed up so hard I ended up breaking my jaw.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What happened to your father?”

“He didn’t get any better,” Vann said. “The meningitis stage fried up his brain. He went into a coma a couple of days after we got to Walter Reed and died a month later. I was there when we unplugged him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” Vann said. She took another sip. “What really sucks is that my dad was one of those people who made a big fuss out of wanting to donate his organs when he died. But when he died, we weren’t allowed to donate any of his organs. They didn’t want someone to get his kidneys and the Haden virus too. We asked Walter Reed if they wanted to use his body for research, and they told us that they already had more bodies for that than they could use. So we ended up cremating him. All of him. He would have hated that.”

“What happened to your mother and sister?” I asked. “Did they get sick?”

“Gwen had a low fever for about three days and was fine,” Vann said. “Mom never got sick at all.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Vann said. “So, then I spent my next three years being self-destructive and in therapy, because I felt guilty about killing my dad.”

“You didn’t kill your dad,” I said, but Vann held up her hand.

“Trust me, Shane,” she said. “Anything you’d say on the topic I’ve already heard a couple thousand times. You’ll just annoy me.”

“All right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just let me tell the story.” Another sip. “Anyway, somewhere in all of this they discover that some of the people who survived the second stage of Haden’s without being locked in can integrate—can use their brains to carry around someone else’s consciousness. Walter Reed has me on file so they contact me and ask me to come in and get tested. So I do. They tell me that my brain is, in the words of one of the testers there, ‘absolutely fucking gorgeous.’”

“That’s not bad,” I said.

“No,” Vann agreed. “And they ask me to become an Integrator. And at the time I’m at American University, ostensibly majoring in biology but actually mostly just getting high and screwing around. And I think, Why not? One, if I become an Integrator the NIH will pick up the rest of my college and pay off half of my existing student loans. Two, when I complete training I’ll have a job, which at the time was something that was getting harder to come by, even for college graduates, and it was a job that wasn’t going to go away. Three, I thought it’d be something that would make my dad proud, and since I killed him, I figured I owed him.”

She looked at me to see if I was going to say anything about her killing her dad. I didn’t.

“So I finish up my degree at American and while I’m doing that I get the neural network installed in my head. That gave me a panic attack because for the first few days it was giving me these massive headaches. Just like the ones I got with the meningitis.” She motioned to her head in a circular motion. “It’s those goddamn wires moving into position.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember it. If you’re a little kid when they install it, you get the joy of feeling it move around as you grow.”

“That sounds like a nightmare,” Vann said. “They told me when they were installing it that there are no nerve endings in the brain, and I told them that they were high, because what was the brain but one massive nerve.”

“Fair point.”

“But then the headaches go away and I’m fine. I go in to Walter Reed every couple of weekends and they run tests and condition my network and generally compliment me on my brain structure, which they say is perfectly tuned to receive someone else’s consciousness. Which I figure is a good thing if this is going to be my line of work. Then I graduate and I immediately start work on the Integrator program, which is more testing and studying the underlying brain mechanics of how integration works. They’re of the opinion that the more you understand it, the better you’re going to be as an Integrator. It won’t be a mystery or magic to you. It’ll just be a process.”

“Are they right?”

“Sure,” Vann said. “Up to a point. Because it’s like everything, right? There’s the theory of it, and then there’s the real-world experience of it. The theory behind integration didn’t bother me at all. I understood the thought mapping and transmission protocols, the concerns about cross-interference between brains and why learning meditation techniques would help us be better receptacles for our clients, and all that. It all made perfect sense, and I wasn’t stupid and I had that gorgeous brain of mine.”

Another sip.

“But then I did my first live integration session and I literally shit myself.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

Vann nodded. “For your first integration session, they have you integrate with a Haden they have on staff. Dr. Harper. It’s her job to integrate with new Integrators, to walk them through the process. Everything she does, she explains as she does it. The idea is no surprises, nothing wild. Just simple things like raising an arm or walking around a table or picking up a cup to drink some water. So I meet her, and we shake hands and she tells me a little bit about what to expect, and she says that she knows I’m probably a little nervous and that’s perfectly normal. And I’m thinking, I’m not nervous at all, let’s just get on with it.

“So she sits down and I sit down, and then I open the connection and I feel her signal requesting permission to download. And I give permission and Jesus fucking Christ there is another person inside my head. And I can feel her. Not just feel her but feel what she’s thinking and what she wants. Not telepathy like I can read her thoughts, but what she’s wanting. Like, I can tell that what she really wants is for the session to be over, because she’s hungry. I don’t know what she wants to eat, but I know she does want to eat. I can’t read her thoughts, but I can feel every single one of them. And it feels like I’m suffocating. Or drowning.”

“Did you tell them?” I asked.

“No, because I knew I wasn’t acting rationally,” Vann said. “I knew that whatever I was feeling was an overreaction. So I tried to use all those relaxation and meditation techniques they’d been training us on. I use them and they seem to work. I’m starting to calm down. And as I’m calming down I realize that everything I’ve been feeling has happened in the space of ten seconds. But fine, whatever, I can handle this.

“Then she tries to move my arm and I just freak the fuck out and my sphincter lets go.”

“Because your arm is moving without your intent,” I said.

“Exactly,” Vann said. “Exactly.” She took another sip. “Because this is what I learned about myself that first day: My body is my body. I don’t want anyone else in it. I don’t want someone else controlling it, or trying to. It’s my own little space in the world and the only space I have. And to have someone else in it, doing anything to it, sends me into a panic.”

“What happened then?”

“She immediately breaks the connection and comes over to me and gets me to stop panicking,” Vann said. “She tells me not to be embarrassed, and that my reaction is a common one. Meanwhile I’m sitting there in my own shit trying not to rip her little mechanical head off. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“She says we’ll go ahead and take a break, so I can get cleaned up and get something to eat, and then we’ll try again. Well, I do go and get cleaned up, but I don’t get anything to eat. Instead what I do is go to the nearest bar in borrowed hospital scrubs and have them line up five shots of tequila. And then I down them one after another in the space of about ninety seconds. And then I go back in for the second session and I fucking nail it.”

“They didn’t notice you being drunk off your ass on tequila,” I said.

“I told you that I spent a few years being self-destructive,” Vann said. “It wasn’t good for my liver, but it was good for being able to drink and still function.”

“So in order to integrate, you had to be drunk.”

“Not drunk,” Vann said. “Not at first. I had to have enough that I wouldn’t panic when someone got inside of me. I figured out that if I could make it past the first five minutes I could handle the rest of the session. I was never happy, but I could tolerate the intrusion. And then when it was done I would go and have another couple of drinks to take the edge off.”

“You didn’t consider just not being an Integrator,” I said.

“No,” Vann said. “You have to spend a minimum amount of time as a professional Integrator or else you have to pay them back for everything they paid out for your education and training. I couldn’t afford that. And I wanted to be an Integrator. I wanted to do the job. I just couldn’t do it strictly sober.”

“Got it,” I said.

“And at first that really didn’t matter,” Vann said. “I got very good at calibrating just how much alcohol I needed to get through a session. I was never drunk and my clients never noticed. I got good reviews and I was in demand and no one ever figured out what I was doing.”

“But it didn’t last,” I said.

“No,” Vann said. Another sip. “The panic never went away. It didn’t become more manageable over time. It got worse, and by the end it got a lot worse. So I upped my therapeutic dose, as I liked to call it.”

“They noticed.”

“They didn’t notice,” Vann said. “By that time I was very good at my gig. The physical aspect of being an Integrator I could mostly do on autopilot. What I couldn’t do as well was put on the brakes. Sometimes a client wants to do something you didn’t agree to in your contract. When that happens you need to pull them back. If they fight you on it, you pull the plug on the session and report them. If it’s bad enough, or if they pull that stunt on too many Integrators, then the client gets blacklisted and isn’t allowed to integrate anymore. It doesn’t happen often because there are so few Integrators that most Hadens don’t want to jeopardize their chances of using one.”

Vann drained her cup.

“You had it happen,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I had a teenage client who wanted to know what it was like to die,” Vann said. “She didn’t want to commit suicide, mind you. She didn’t want to be dead. But she wanted to know what it was like to die. To have that second just before the end when you realized you couldn’t escape, and that this was it. She realized that unlike most people, she was in a position to realize her fantasy. All she needed was to push an Integrator at the last minute. Then she would have her moment, and since everyone knew Integrators could stop their clients from doing anything stupid, it would look like it was the Integrator who did it, and that the client was the victim. All she needed was the Integrator to be inattentive just long enough.”

“How did she know?”

“That I was the right Integrator for her plan?” I nodded. “She didn’t. She didn’t have a long-term contract, so she went into the NIH integration lottery and got who she got. It just happened to be me.

“But the rest of it. Well. She planned, Shane. She knew what she was going to do and how she was going to do it and had it down so well that when we integrated I couldn’t feel what she had planned for me. All I could tell was that she was excited about something. Well, most of my clients were excited about something when they were with me. That was the whole point of using an Integrator. To do something that excited you with an actual human’s body.”

“How was she going to kill you?” I asked.

“Her stated purpose for wanting an Integrator was that her parents had managed to get her a special event at the National Zoo,” Vann said. “She was going to be allowed to hold and play with a small tiger cub. It was a birthday present. But before she did that she wanted to walk around the Mall to look at some of the memorials. So we integrated, we walked around the Mall, and then we went into the Smithsonian Metro station to go to the zoo. We stood near the edge of the platform and watched the train roll in. At the last possible instant, she jumped.

“I felt her tensing, felt what she wanted to do, but my reaction time was too slow. I had four tequilas before we integrated. By the time I could do anything about it we were already in the air and almost off the platform. There was no way for me to do anything about it. I was about to die because a client killed me.

“Then I was jerked back and fell hard onto the platform as the train flew past. I looked up and there was this homeless guy looking down at me. He told me later he’d been watching me because of the way I was pacing and looking down the track for the train. He said he recognized what I was doing because at one point he thought about jumping in front of a train himself. He recognized it, Shane. But I didn’t.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“I pulled the fucking plug on her, that’s what,” Vann said. “Then I had her charged with attempted murder. She said it was me who tried to jump, but we got a court order for her personal effects and records, which included a journal where she described her planning. She was charged and we cut a deal where she got probation, therapy, and was forever blacklisted from integrating.”

“You were easy on her,” I said.

“Maybe,” Vann said. “But I just didn’t want to have to deal with her anymore. I didn’t want to have to deal with any of it. I was almost killed because someone used me to see what it was like to die. Everything my panic attacks were trying to tell me about integrating had just come true. So I quit.”

“Did the NIH try to get you to pay back your training and college?”

“No,” Vann said. “They were the ones who assigned the client to me. They didn’t know the reason I almost died was because my reaction time was dulled by alcohol, and I didn’t volunteer the fact. As far as anyone could tell, the problem was that the selection process didn’t screen for garden-variety psychopaths. Which was true enough. I promised not to sue, they let me go without a fight, and the selection process was changed to protect Integrators from dangerous Hadens, so I ended up doing some good. And then the FBI tracked me down and said they were looking to build up a Haden-focused division and thought I might be a good fit. And, well. I needed a job.”

“And here we are,” I said.

“And here we are,” Vann agreed. “Now you know why I stopped being an Integrator. And why I drink and smoke and fuck like I do: because I spent years working in a state of alcoholically managed panic, and then someone tried to kill me with my own body. I don’t drink as much as I used to. I smoke more. I fuck about the same. I think I’ve earned all of them.”

“I won’t argue with you about that.”

“Thank you,” Vann said. “And now, this fucking case. It’s every single thing that made my brain scream, come to life. When I almost died, it was on me. I wasn’t paying attention and someone took advantage of that inattention to make me do something I wouldn’t do. If I had died, at the end of the day it would have been for the choices I made. To drink and to stay in the integration corps.

“But this. This is someone taking away the Integrator’s choice. It’s locking them into their own body and making them do things they wouldn’t do. That they would never do. And then throwing them away.” She pointed to me. “Brenda Rees. She didn’t kill herself.”

“No,” I said. “I saw her face when her client disconnected. She tried to get away from the grenade. She had no control before that.”

“She was locked in,” Vann said. “Locked into her own body until there was nothing she could do about what was going to happen. We need to figure out how this is happening. Why it’s happening. We have to stop it.”

“We know who is behind it,” I said.

“No, we think we know who is behind it,” Vann said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“I want to share your optimism,” Vann said. She held up her cup. “I’m not entirely sure I’ve had enough of this to do so.”

“You might have had enough,” I suggested.

“Not yet,” Vann said. “But soon. Think maybe a shot more will do it.”