Текст книги "Lock in"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-two

AT ELEVEN FIFTEEN I called Klah Redhouse and asked for a meeting with him, his boss, the speaker, and the president of the Navajo Nation, to catch them up on the latest with Johnny Sani and Bruce Skow. The meeting happened at noon.

They were not pleased with my report. Not for how I’d been doing my job, which was not in dispute, but that two of their own had been victimized.

“You are working on this,” President Becenti said, in a manner that was not a question.

“Yes,” I said. “Johnny Sani and Bruce Skow will have justice. That is my word to you.” I waited.

“What is it?” Becenti said.

“You said yesterday that anything you could do to help, you would,” I said.

“Yes,” Becenti said.

“Did you mean that only within the parameters of the investigation, or would it extend further than that?”

Becenti looked at me doubtfully. “What do you mean?” he said.

“There’s justice, and then there’s sticking a knife in someone’s ribs,” I said. “The justice will come no matter what. Like I said, you already have my word on that. But the knife-sticking may come with an extra added benefit to the Navajo Nation.”

Becenti looked at the speaker and the police captain, and then back at me. “Tell us more,” he said.

I glanced over at Redhouse as I spoke. He was smiling.

*   *   *

At one thirty I was at my parents’ house, sitting with my dad in the trophy room. He was in a bathrobe and had a tumbler of scotch, neat, dangling from one of his long, large hands.

“How you doing, Dad?” I asked.

He smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Last night someone broke into my house to kill my kid, I killed him with a shotgun, and now I’m hiding out in my trophy room because it’s one of the only rooms in the house that photographers outside don’t have a clear shot into. I’m doing great.”

“What did the police say about the shooting?” I asked.

“The sheriff came by this morning and assured me that as far as he and his department are concerned, the shooting was justified and no charges are coming and that they’ll be returning my shotgun to me later today,” Dad said.

“That’s good to hear,” I said.

“That’s what I said, too,” Dad said. “They also said the FBI came for the man’s body this morning. Does that have anything to do with you?”

“It does,” I said. “If anyone asks, the fact that you were about to run for the Senate meant that we had an interest in discovering whether the attacker had any ties with known hate or terrorism groups.”

“But it’s not really about that at all, is it?”

“I’ll answer that for you, Dad, but you have to tell me you’re ready to hear it.”

“Jesus, Chris,” Dad said. “Someone tried to kill you last night in our house. If you don’t tell me why, I might strangle you myself.”

So I told Dad the entire story, up to my morning visit to the Navajo Nation.

After I finished, Dad said nothing. Then he drained his scotch, said, “I need a refill,” and stepped out into the gun room. When he came back in he had considerably more than two fingers of scotch in the tumbler.

“You might want to ease back, there, Dad,” I said.

“Chris, it’s a miracle I didn’t just bring in the bottle with a straw,” he said. He took a sip. “Motherfucker was in my house three nights ago,” he said, of Hubbard. “In this room. Acting all chummy.”

“To be fair, three nights ago I don’t think he had planned to have me killed,” I said. “Pretty sure that came after.”

Dad choked on his scotch on that one. I patted him on the back until he stopped coughing.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Dad said, and waved me off. He set down his drink and looked at me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Tell me what I should do,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that son of a bitch tried to kill you,” Dad said, loudly, forcefully. “My only child. My flesh and blood. Tell me what to do, Chris. If you told me to shoot him, I would go do it right now.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

“Stab him,” Dad said. “Drown him. Run him over with my truck.”

“They are all tempting,” I said. “But none of those is a good idea.”

“Then tell me,” Dad said. “Tell me what I can do.”

“Before I do,” I said. “Let me ask. Senate?”

“Oh. Well. That,” Dad said, and reached for his scotch. I picked it up and moved it out of his reach. He looked at me quizzically, but accepted it and sat back. “William came over this morning, first thing,” he said, referring to the state party chairman. “He was all concern and sympathy and told me how much he admired me standing up for my home and family, and somehow all that puffery ended up with me being told that there’s no way the party could support me this election cycle. And perhaps it was just me, but I think there was the implication I wouldn’t be supported in any election cycle that might come up.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Dad shrugged. “It is what it is, kid,” he said. “It saves me the trouble of pretending to be nice to a bunch of assholes I never really liked.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “So. Dad. I need to you do something for me.”

“Yeah?” Dad said. “And what is that, Chris?”

“I need you to do a business deal,” I said.

Dad furrowed his brow at me. “How did we get to a business deal?” he asked. “I thought we were talking revenge and politics.”

“We still are,” I said. “And the way it will get done is through a business deal.”

“With whom?” Dad asked.

“With the Navajo, Dad,” I said.

Dad sat up, uncomfortable. “I know you’ve been busy,” he said. “But I just shot one of their people last night. I don’t think they’ll want to do business with me today.”

“No one blames you for it.”

“I blame me for it,” Dad said.

“You didn’t shoot him because he was Navajo,” I said. “You shot him because he was about to shoot me. He wasn’t there because he was a bad man. He was there because bad men were using him.”

“Which means I shot an innocent man,” Dad said.

“You did,” I said. “And I’m sorry about that, Dad. But you didn’t kill him. Lucas Hubbard did. He just used you to do it. And if you hadn’t, it would be me who was dead.”

Dad put his head in his hands. I let him take a moment.

“Bruce Skow was innocent,” I said. “Johnny Sani was innocent. Neither of them are coming back. But I have a way you can punish the person responsible for both of their deaths. You’ll also get to help out a lot of people in the Navajo Nation in the bargain. Something really good can come out of this thing. You just have to do what you already do better than anyone else. Do some business.”

“What kind of business are we talking about here?”

“Real estate,” I said. “Sort of.”

*   *   *

Three thirty, and I was with Jim Buchold, in his home office. “We’re tearing down both buildings,” he said, of Loudoun Pharma campus. “Well. We’re tearing down the office building, which the Loudoun County inspectors tell me is mostly cracked off its foundation. The labs are already gone. We’re just clearing the rubble for that.”

“What’s going to happen to Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“In the short run, tomorrow I’m going to a memorial for our janitors,” Buchold said. “All six of them at the same time. They were all each other’s friends. It makes sense to do it that way. Then on Monday I’m laying off everyone in the company and then taking bids for buyers.”

I cocked my head at that. “Someone wants to buy Loudoun Pharma?” I asked.

“We have a number of valuable patents and we were able to retrieve a good amount of our current research, some of which can probably be reconstructed,” Buchold said. “And if whoever buys the company hires our researchers, there’s a chance they’ll reconstruct it faster. And we still have our government contracts, although I’m having our lawyers go through those contracts now to make sure they can’t be withdrawn because of terrorism.”

“Then why sell at all?” I asked.

“Because I’m done,” Buchold said. “I put twenty years into this company and then it all went up in a single night. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t,” Buchold said. “You can’t know. I didn’t know until someone took two decades of my life and turned it into a pile of rubble. I think about trying to build it back up from nothing and all it does is make me feel tired. So, no. Time for me and Rick to retire to the Outer Banks, get a beach house, and run corgis up and down the sand until they collapse.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

“It’ll be great,” Buchold said. “For the first week. After that I’ll have to figure out what to do with myself.”

“The night of my dad’s party, you were talking about the therapies you were developing to unlock people from Haden’s,” I said.

“I remember I dragged you into the argument,” Buchold said. “Rick gave me crap for that yesterday when he remembered it. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I remember that night you also mentioned the drug you were developing.”

“Neuroulease.”

“That’s right,” I said. “How far along were you with it?”

“You mean, how long until Neuroulease was on the market?”

“Yes.”

“We were feeling optimistic that we’d have enough progress on the drug within the year to apply for clinical trials,” Buchold said. “And if those showed promise we were pretty much already guaranteed a fast track at the FDA for approval. You have four and a half million people suffering from lock in. Especially now that Abrams-Kettering’s on the books, the sooner we can unlock them, the better.”

“What about now?” I asked.

“Well, one of the principal investigators blew up the company, and with it a whole lot of our data and documentation,” Buchold said. “Then he killed himself, and however I feel about that at the moment, he was the one who could have most easily reconstructed that data from what we have left. From what we have now, it’ll take five to seven years before we’re at the clinical trial stage again. And that’s optimistic.”

“Anyone else as close to it as you were?” I asked.

“I know Roche has a combination drug and brain stimulus therapy they’ve been working on,” Buchold said. “But they’re nowhere close to clinical trials with that. No one else is even in the same ballpark.” He looked at me sourly. “You want to hear something funny?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That bastard Hubbard,” he said. “At your dad’s party he was tearing into me about Haden culture and how they didn’t want to be free of their disease and doing everything short of implying I was encouraging a genocide.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Yesterday that son of a bitch calls up and makes an offer on Loudoun Pharma!” Buchold said.

“For how much?”

“For fucking not enough!” Buchold said. “And I let him know. He said the offer was flexible but that he wanted to move quickly. And I said to him that a couple of days before he was telling me what a horrible idea our work was, and now he wanted to buy it? Do you know what he said?”

“I don’t know,” I said, although I had some idea.

“He said, ‘Business is business’!” Buchold exclaimed. “Jesus lord. I just about hung up on him then.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Buchold said. “Because he’s right. Business is business. I have six hundred employees who are going to be out of work in three days, and even though Rick doesn’t think I should socialize with them”—Buchold rolled his eyes, and looked around to see if his husband was about—“I do feel responsible for them. It would be fine with me if some of them kept their jobs, and the rest had better severance pay than they would have otherwise.”

“So you would sell to him?” I asked.

“If no one else steps up with a better offer, I just might,” Buchold said. “Why? Do you think I should pass on the offer?”

“I would never tell you how to run your own business, Mr. Buchold.”

“What’s left of it anyway,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Agent Shane. You find me a good reason to keep my options open, and maybe I’ll do just that.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will see what I can do.”

*   *   *

Five o’clock, and I was in the liminal space of Cassandra Bell.

It was bare. And by bare, I mean that there was literally nothing in it.

This was not the vast expanse of endless space. It was the absolute opposite, a close, tight darkness. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of black ink. For the first time I understood claustrophobia.

“Most people find my liminal space uncomfortable, Agent Shane,” Bell said. A voice that I could not see and which came from everywhere, although quietly. It was like being inside the head of a very private person. Which, I suppose, was exactly what this was.

“I can understand that,” I said.

“Does it bother you?”

“I’m trying not to let it.”

“I find it comforting,” Bell said. “It reminds me of the womb. They say we don’t remember what it is like to be there, but I don’t believe that. I think deep inside we always know. It’s why children burrow under blankets and cats push their heads into your elbow when they sit beside you. I’ve not had those experiences myself, but I know why they happen. I’ve been told my liminal space is like the dark of the grave. But I think of it as the dark from the other end of life entirely. The dark of everything ahead, not everything behind.”

“I like the way you put that,” I said. “I’m going to try to think of it that way.”

“That’s the way. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, Agent Shane,” Bell said.

And then she was in front of me, close, a lit candle illuminating her face, the light throwing back the darkness to a breathable distance.

“Thank you,” I said, and felt a shudder of relief.

“You are welcome,” she said, and smiled, looking younger than twenty years old, although of course here she could appear to be any age she wished.

“And thank you for seeing me on short notice,” I said. “I know you are busy.”

“I am always busy,” she said. Not a brag, or a show of pride, just a fact. She smiled at me again. “But of course I know of you, Agent Shane. Chris Shane. The Haden Child. So strange, isn’t it, that we have not met before this.”

“I had that same thought the other day,” I said.

“And why do you suppose that is, that we have only now met.”

“We ran in different circles,” I said.

“Ran in different circles,” she said. “And now the image I have is of you and me moving in separate orbits, centered on different stars.”

“Same metaphor,” I said. “Different description.”

“Yes!” Bell said, and gave a small laugh. “And who was your star? Whom did you orbit?”

“My father, I suppose,” I said.

“He is a good man,” Bell said. Not a question.

“Yes,” I said, and thought of him this morning, in his bathrobe, scotch in his hand, grieving for Bruce Skow.

“I know what happened,” Bell said. “To and by your father. I am sorry for it.”

“Thank you,” I said, strangely touched by her manner of speaking. Formal and yet also intimate. “Who was your star, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t know,” Bell said. “I still don’t know. I am beginning to suspect it’s not a person but is an idea. And that’s why I’m strange, and also gives me my power.”

“Maybe,” I said, as diplomatically as possible.

She caught it, smiled, and laughed at me. “I don’t mean to be obtuse or intentionally bizarre, Agent Shane, honestly I don’t,” she said. “It’s just that I am terribly bad at small talk. The longer it goes on the more I sound like a refugee from a commune.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I live in an intentional community myself.”

“Kind of you to empathize with me,” Cassandra Bell said. “You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment. This time it is.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You did not come to make small talk with me,” she said. “As well as you make it.”

“No,” I said. “I came to talk to you about your brother.”

“Have you,” she said. “I would like to tell you a story of my brother, if you will hear it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“He was a little boy when I was born and he knew that I was held within myself,” she said. “And so he would come to me, and kiss me on my forehead, and sing to me for hours. Can you imagine. What other seven-year-old boy would do such a thing. You have no sisters or brothers.”

“No,” I said.

“Do you miss them?”

“I can’t miss what I never had,” I said.

“Which is not true at all,” Bell said. “But I have put it poorly. I mean do you feel that you have missed out by not having siblings.”

“I think it would have been interesting to have siblings,” I said.

“Your parents had no more after you.”

“I think they were worried that if they did, they would neglect one or the other of us to focus on the other,” I said. “And that the one who was neglected would have eventually become resentful. It’s hard to have one child be a Haden and one not. I would imagine.” I paused.

“You have a question about me and my brother,” Bell said.

“I wondered if you ever integrated with him,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Bell said. “Altogether too intimate, I should think. I love my brother and he me. But I have no desire to be inside of his head, and I don’t believe he wants me in his. Both of us in the same head at the same time! We would become our parents.”

“That’s an image,” I said.

“I have never integrated. I am enough in my own head. I don’t wish to be in someone else’s as well.”

I smiled at this. “You should meet my partner,” I said. “She was an Integrator who didn’t like people being in her head.”

“We would be like magnets,” Bell said. “Either rushing together or pushing apart.”

“Another interesting image,” I said.

“Tell me about my brother.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him?”

“That’s not telling me of my brother, but I’ll allow it,” Bell said. “We spoke the other day. He wishes to spend time with me Saturday afternoon.”

“And will you?”

“Wouldn’t you make time for your family?” Bell asked. “I know how you would answer so you don’t have to.”

“I would make time for them,” I said, answering anyway. “Will you meet him here?”

“Yes, and also he will be with my body,” Bell said. “He still likes to sing to me, to my ears.”

“Will anyone else be there?”

“He is family.”

“So, no.”

“Agent Shane, now is an excellent time to stop making small talk,” Bell said.

“We believe your brother has had his body taken over by a client,” I said. “This client has considerable technical skill and has been able to change the programming of your brother’s neural network in order to trap him and use the body for his own purposes. We believe he means to use your brother’s body to kill you and then kill your brother as well. It will look like a murder-suicide.”

“And you believe this why?”

“Because he’s taken over other bodies,” I said. “In the same way. He and an associate have both done it. The end result has been three dead Integrators.”

Cassandra Bell looked very solemn, the light from the candle suddenly guttering and flickering before resuming a steady glow. “You believe he is possessed already, then.”

“Possessed,” I said, and I realized that it simply hadn’t occurred to me to think of what happened to Johnny Sani or Bruce Skow or Brenda Kees in that way. “Yes. He is already possessed.”

“For how long?”

“We believe since last Tuesday morning at least.”

“Why has it taken you this long to tell me of it?”

“We didn’t know it was possible until yesterday,” I said. “We didn’t think it affected your brother until today. It shouldn’t have been possible. And because it shouldn’t be possible we didn’t pick up on it until now.”

“Is he dead?”

“Your brother? No.”

“I know his body isn’t dead,” Bell said. “I mean him. My brother’s soul.”

“We don’t think so,” I said. “We believe strongly that he is alive, but locked in. Unable to speak or communicate to the outside world. Like … well, like us. But without a threep or liminal space or an Agora. And with his body at the whim of another, doing things he would not choose to himself.”

“He would not choose to murder me,” Bell agreed. “You say you strongly believe that he is alive.”

“Yes.”

“Describe the strength of that belief.”

“Strong as iron,” I said. “Strong as oak.”

“Iron rusts. Oak burns.”

“We can’t be certain,” I said. “But from what we know, the person possessed still exists. The person I saw possessed like this still existed after her client left.”

“You said they all died.”

“She died,” I said. “Her client pulled the pin on a grenade before he left.”

“Who are these people?” Bell asked.

“We’d rather not say,” I said. “For your own protection.”

Cassandra Bell’s candle brightened immensely even as the darkness sucked in more tightly around me. “Agent Shane,” she said. “Do not confuse me for a child. I am not damaged, nor am I incapable. I am bringing hundreds of thousands of us to announce ourselves to the world. I could not do this if I were a coddled thing. I do not need protection. I need information.”

“It’s Lucas Hubbard,” I said.

“Oh,” Bell said. The candle returned to its original state. “Him.”

“You know him.”

“With the exception of you, Agent Shane, I know almost everyone of importance.” Not a brag, just a fact.

“What is your opinion of him?”

“Now, or before I learned that he’s enslaving my brother in his own body?”

I smiled at this. “Before.”

“Intelligent. Ambitious. Able to speak passionately about Hadens when it is convenient and advantageous for him to do so, and when not, not.”

“Standard-issue billionaire,” I said.

Bell fixed me with a stare. “I would imagine you of all people would know not all billionaires are poor humans,” she said.

“In my experience, there are few much like my father,” I said.

“A pity,” Bell said. “When will you rescue my brother?”

“Soon,” I said.

“There are whole paragraphs lurking behind that single syllable,” Bell said. “Or perhaps you merely meant to say ‘soon, but not yet.’”

“There are complications,” I said.

“I won’t ask you to imagine the terror of being locked in, Agent Shane,” Bell said. “I know you know it all too well. What I would ask you is why you would willingly inflict it on anyone else for a second longer than you had to.”

“To save others from that same fate,” I said. “And to punish Hubbard in a way more complete than mere capture. And to keep your brother safe.”

Bell looked at me, stony. “If we move on him this second, we have enough to charge him for and punish him for,” I said. “But he’s not stupid. He’s almost certainly planned for the contingency of being caught. He’s rich and he’s got more lawyers than some countries have people. He’ll tie things up for years, cut deals, and introduce doubt. And the very first thing he’ll do is cover his tracks however possible. That includes getting rid of the single person who can account for every moment of Hubbard’s movements over the last week.”

“My brother,” Bell said.

“Your brother,” I said. “Hubbard’s smart, but his intelligence and ambition are also his blind spot. He believes he’s covered every angle and every contingency. But we propose that there are a couple of angles he can’t see.”

“Because they are in his blind spot.”

“Yes.”

“Promise me my brother,” Bell said.

“I promise you I will do everything I can to save him,” I said. “I promise we will do everything we can.”

“Now tell me how you plan to capture Hubbard.”

“He intends to kill you,” I said.

“So you say.”

“I think we should let him try.”