The Deluge, page 57
“Yeah, she’s fine. Just give her a minute.”
After the house was disturbed, disassembled, and inked with radical right-wing threats, the man brought in a can of gasoline.
“Give us a head start,” he said. “Then douse the place in bleach, light both bodies up, and drive. The rest should take care of itself.”
“I’ll go with them,” said Jansi. “Third Cell are my progeny, ya know? I’m a proud mama.” She winked, and Shane wanted to scream.
Before they left, Jansi grabbed Quinn’s arm and pulled her cheek to cheek. She whispered something fiercely, but Shane couldn’t make out the words. Then the Third Cell operatives were gone, their unmarked van crunching over the gravel as it swung a U-turn and drove back up the long driveway. Quinn clunked over in her boot, knelt beside Shane, and put a hand on her knee. Shane looked over her shoulder at Emmy, lying out in the grass.
“We didn’t have a choice. You know that.”
Shane nodded.
“If he turned himself in, he would’ve given us all up eventually.”
“I said I understand,” she hissed, and then thumped a palm loudly off her chest. “You think I don’t understand?” She found herself shouting, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. “I’m the one, bitch. I fucking made this thing. You think I’d let Allen fuck us like that? Ever? But then you’re bringing in the clown car, Quinn. I told you what he said in confidence. I told you we could take care of it, and you go and spill your guts across our entire organization. Now we have two bodies. Have you thought that this might be what gets us caught?”
“The fire will take care of it.”
“They pull DNA out of fires, you fucking moron. Jesus Christ, and you were Ivy League? Arsonists get caught all the time. They have the DNA of the whole fucking country on file, and you bring in three extra fucking people like this is a club meeting, you stupid blond bitch.”
“You need to keep your head,” said Quinn, a tinge of desperation, her eyes watering.
“I have my fucking head straight, it’s you and the—”
A thump from upstairs.
Both their heads snapped up. Shane stood slowly for the first time since Emmy had shown her to the seat. Quinn’s welling eyes ceased, and she wiped her tears. They stared at the ceiling. A smatter of quick footsteps.
“The dog?” said Quinn.
Shane shook her head. “There’s no dog. We would’ve seen it by now.”
The backyard light blinked on, a grisly spotlight on poor Emmy lying prone in the grass. A figure dropped from the second story and cried out as his legs buckled to absorb the ground, and Shane got a flash of messy brown hair, a white T-shirt, a patchy red beard, and bright red acne on a pale forehead. The boy picked himself up, looked back at the house in panic, and then leaped over his mother’s body, running as fast as his torqued ankle would allow.
Before any of this could sink in, Quinn was thrusting hard metal into Shane’s limp hand. “Go. You have to catch him or we’re done.”
Why me? she nearly screamed, but Quinn only pointed to her left foot, encased in plastic. She took Shane’s hand and forced it to fist around the gun.
“Go!”
And then Shane was sprinting through the dark, blinking to get her eyes to adjust. She could hear the kid, huffing with terror, crashing across a fallow field where the Fords grew a bit of wheat. The stars shattered the night sky, and the instinct buried in the human cell, the recall of the hunt under a burning Milky Way, fueled a wild, panicked kind of joy, and she could run faster than she ever imagined.
Then the boy tripped, maybe forty feet in front of her, and sprawled face-first onto the ground, skidding through dirt and leaves. He paddled forward, tried to get back to his feet, but Shane was standing over him now, finger on the trigger. “Stop,” she said, breath pluming in front of her.
He flipped himself onto his back and met her eyes. A galootish version of the youngest boy from the picture. Perry. Maybe he was college age by now. He waved his hands in front of his face, a smartwatch lighting up with the red glow of a failed text message. “I don’t even know you,” he begged. “I don’t know you—I don’t know any of you.”
Shane pulled the trigger and the bullet punched through his stomach. His scream was louder than the gunshot, high-pitched and keening, like Lali in the throes of a tantrum. She took a step forward, aimed for his head, and fired again. But she’d never used a handgun before, and she missed, the bullet kicking up dirt beside his shoulder. He was crying, clutching his abdomen.
“Go get my dad get my dad get my dad go get my dad,” he kept crying. She aimed for his body, and the weapon kicked for the third time, and now the bullet hit him square in the chest. It made a small, dark typographical mark in his clean white T-shirt, and his pleading turned to a ghastly wheeze hissing from his throat. To make sure, Shane took another step and pulled the trigger one last time. The bullet tore through his mouth and out the back of his neck, and the boy was still and quiet. It was too dark to see much of the blood, but she could smell it, coppery and wet, mixing with the burned tang of gunpowder. She stood in the field for a moment, sucking wind. Perry Ford had probably tried to text or call from his watch, but the cell jammer had done its job. So he’d panicked and made a run for it. She felt her own hot tears in her mouth, though she didn’t think she’d been crying. She began running back toward the house.
* * *
The postpartum terror swallowed her immediately upon returning home from the hospital. They warn new mothers of this possibility, but there is no such thing as preparation. Shane’s was a fear and sadness internal and external. Throbbing in her bones while being buried alive. She was in a small box under ten feet of earth screaming for help while her air ran out. She felt like this day and night. It was all she could do to leave her bed in the morning to feed her daughter. She needed a job, she needed work, she needed help, she needed her pelvic floor to heal so she’d stop pissing herself every time she sneezed. The baby never slept, barely ate, and screamed so much it was like the child wanted to tear her own throat out. The worse it got, the more Shane could not bear to leave her bed. By the tenth month of having her baby home, desperation had set in. She began thinking through other avenues. Two years earlier, before the pregnancy, she’d interviewed for a job down the highway. Ricardo and Molly’s All-American Taqueria served diner food and Tex-Mex. A proud little mom-and-pop with a video camera system that didn’t work anymore. She’d learned this in the interview. “But don’t tell no one,” said owner and part-time manager Molly. “And don’t rob us neither.” This memory came buzzing back like a fly landing on her nose.
After emptying gallons of bleach over house and field, Allen, Emmy, Perry, and their home had gone up easily in a few splashes of gasoline. Why had Perry thought it mattered that he didn’t know who they were? He thought his murderer must be a known enemy? That a killer could be a stranger—or worse, a faceless bureaucracy—had seemed an alien concept to him, and this troubled her for some reason. At least she figured out the mystery of the dog. Before they left she found the vet bill. They’d just put him down that week. Quinn drove them upstate, crossing into North Carolina, where they slept in the car at a rest stop. Despite her exhaustion, Shane barely closed her eyes the whole night, blinking awake at the first spires of dawn. They switched cars the next morning, exchanging keys with a bearded operative in a pleasant park in the suburbs of Baltimore. He hid his eyes behind sunglasses and made no comment about being abruptly called into service without explanation. They drove north, stopping at a safe house to shower and change.
“What do we tell Murdock and Kai?” Shane asked.
“Nothing just yet. We see what she says first.”
Shane stared out the window and watched Pennsylvania go by. Patches of snow covered the fields and homes. She’d seen the flag flying more than once: HATE—YOU KNOW WHAT IT STANDS FOR.
“What if she doesn’t see things our way?”
Shane thought of the first squeeze of the trigger, and the awful sound Perry made. A shriek, a squeal, and a plea all in one vicious exhalation of breath.
* * *
She hadn’t been to New York City since her recruiting trip in 2020, but the new security protocols felt fantastical, part of another society’s future. Crossing into Manhattan from any entrance point, you had to pose for a picture. There was no entrance or exit without this brief catalogue of who was coming and going. They removed their hats so the FaceRec, mounted in an old-fashioned tollbooth, wouldn’t flag them. Police officers, at ease in body armor, helmets, and full tactical gear, watched, rubber straps of gas masks jiggling on their thighs. The booth they approached had an ICE van beside it, along with a graffiti tag, Chinga la Migra. They were taking an enormous risk, a gift to law enforcement and the AIs that served them. If the algorithms saw these two women, who supposedly lived on opposite sides of the country and had no known connection, sitting chummily in a car not registered to either of them, perhaps digital flags would begin to fly. But once they were in the city, Quinn took out her laptop, hacked into the NYPD databases, and erased their images from the files in less than five minutes.
TIME FOR A CHANGE Of leadership. Of direction. Of purpose. Shane had been right in Wisconsin. They had built something incredibly powerful, and it wasn’t being used to its full effect. Not even close. Quinn had known Kai since undergrad, and when he’d recruited her, he’d described the group as democratically organized. This, of course, had been bullshit.
CONTROL In practice, Kai was a shadow dictator with a firm grip on the money and logistics. Yet Quinn was the one who had to go online and make it all function. She and her small team of hackers worked to cover the tracks of their operatives in the field. They ran background checks on recruits and slipped nooses around the necks of their ops lest they go Kroll. They turned out lawyers to defend the captured, and they wiped clean money, houses, cars, and bomb materials when necessary. Fry a license plate scanner in Oregon, track an ATF agent who’d actually traced the blasting caps back to the correct retailer, delete an ATF file, work with impeccable OpSec. Find the vulnerabilities of the targets. Erase your tracks. Do meticulous work. All Kai did was funnel her the cash. She and Shane had been discussing this for a while. If they were going to “shut down” Allen (as Shane put it), they should make their move. Get the money on their side and there was no longer anything to discuss.
The building was old, squat, and brown, crammed onto West Twenty-Second Street, looking ripe for a teardown so some mirrored glass and steel could take its place. Floor one belonged to Sally Jacobson Salon, floors two and three to the Grimm Consultancy, and four, five, and six were the domain of Styx Capital Management. She and Quinn had dressed business formal that afternoon at a truck stop. Shane wore a black pantsuit purchased at a discount department store and had pulled her hair into a scalp-stretching topknot. She had to empty a full package of bobby pins and a can of hairspray before achieving the desired effect while Quinn threw on a fringe tweed collarless jacket and snapped into a professional look in ten minutes.
It was late in the workday and night had already descended, swallowing the city in brake lights and the glitter of skyscrapers. Most of the office workers at Styx, data analysts and the like, were filtering out, piling on big winter coats, mittens, scarves, and cumbersome gloves to brave the cold before sweating it out on the choked, lumbering subway.
Shane and Quinn waited in minimalist chairs, staring at posh modern art, while the personal assistant buzzed for Ms. Bhattacharyya. “Your five o’clock is here.” Though Styx mostly dealt in short selling, the boss was always looking for intriguing opportunities, particularly venture-seeding women entrepreneurs. CNN played on a flat-screen, images of the homeless crisis raging across the country as California shuffled around those dispossessed by its megafires and DHS used the opportunity to deport immigrants back to their violent, disintegrating countries in Central and South America. Victims of the Great Eastern Flood were set to lose their FEMA trailers in two months’ time, with President Love promising relief and Republicans drawing a line in the sand. Tens of thousands were still living out of cars and tents anyway, what was a few more? Finally, the assistant swept each of them with a wand before showing them in. “No phones?” the assistant asked.
“We knew not to bring them,” said Shane.
“Can’t be too paranoid these days,” said Archie Bhattacharyya, smiling as though it were a joke. Upon shaking the woman’s hand, Shane experienced a moment of shock at her brutish Long Island accent. “And please, call me Archie.”
They took their seats, declined bottled water, and the assistant finally left. Bhattacharyya took a seat behind a smudge-free glass desk. Only a computer screen, a keyboard, and a wireless mouse appeared to float midair. She was an attractive woman, short blue hair rising off her scalp in a gelled pompadour with metalloid-skeletal earrings dangling from her ears. Her crisp green blouse and furrowed skirt looked of money and taste, which was in such contrast to all the diphthongs she left strewn in her sentences.
“When I received your message, I had to ask myself, ‘Now what on God’s blue earth would possess these ladies to blow up our safeguards, waltz right into my office, past cameras, past my entire staff, to sit down for a face-to-face?’ ” Every vowel had an extra syllable. Safegawwds was particularly irksome. Bhattacharyya flicked a hand, so that a gold bracelet came unstuck from the meat of her palm. “There are only two answers, really. Either you’ve been found out, and you came to establish a rapport before you start wearing a wire, or something’s gone wrong with our venture, which I’m supposed to be insulated from.”
“Right,” said Quinn, who sat confidently with her legs crossed, hands clasped on her knee. “It’s that second one. We need to execute a corporate realignment. A new strategy for—”
“How did you find me?” Archie cut her off. Quinn’s boot scuffed uneasily against the carpet as she slid upright to improve her posture. She began stammering an explanation. Shane tried to help.
“I narrowed it down until I was absolutely sure,” she said.
“That’s opaque.”
“A few years back,” she explained, “I saw a set of our codes with this address. It was just a matter of figuring out…” Shane swallowed and shifted her road-trip-sore butt in the chair. “It was luck, mostly.”
Bhattacharyya nodded. “So you’re making moves. Come directly to Mama for cash. Why?”
“You have to see it from our perspective,” said Quinn. “Kai is using his access to control tactical decisions. Meanwhile, Shane here is trying to raise a kid and plan these operations, and by keeping us siloed from the other cells, Kai has the entire—”
“Excuse me, Ms.—I’m sorry, I know that wasn’t your real name.”
“Call me Quinn.”
“Quinn,” she said, the vowel pancaking out for an eternity. “Excuse me, but I don’t give a good goddamn fart about who slighted who at the company picnic. Skip the editorials.”
Quinn began to object, a vein rising in the center of her forehead, her composure cracking, and Shane simply spoke over her.
“One of our members was going to turn himself in.” Bhattacharyya’s eyes switched to her, and from that point forward, they did not return to Quinn for even a glance. “He felt guilty over the deaths in Washington.”
“Turn himself in? To the Feds?”
“Who else. He was going to come forward. So we did something about it.”
Bhattacharyya arched an eyebrow. “What did you do?”
“What had to be done. It’s best if you don’t know.”
Archie Bhattacharyya finally appeared to have nerves. She cleared her throat, recovered.
“Does Kai know?”
“No. Not yet.” Shane nodded, stern and thoughtful. “I guess my question is: Are you actually a true believer in what we’re doing? Or did you just see a financial opportunity?”
“Are you actually suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” she asked. “That I risked my life and freedom to get rich in a spectacularly complex manner?”
ARCHIE Blondie made her want to upchuck all over that cheap biz-formal wardrobe. This other brassy bitch was all right, though. Archie had read every book or article on body language and comm ever written and firmly believed she could deconstruct anyone after sitting across from them for just a minute. Because the plump lady didn’t look like she had any balls when she walked in, Archie was surprised and impressed to find her voice and eyes strong. She could tell the woman had a vision.
“Short selling has been lucrative for you. If you can believe in a cause and get rich off it…”
“You’re trying my patience, missy.”
“I’m not judging. Like Quinn said, we’re here to recruit you.” Bhattacharyya sat back, breathing deeply through her nostrils, and splayed her hands for Shane to continue. “We have three autonomous cells in operation now, and with a bit more money, we can have two more up and running in the next year.”
“All well and good, but the way things are going, they’ll sooner take a nuke to the Constitution then let you hit another target. I have contacts in D.C. who tell me Love is going to twist the nuts off people to find 6Degrees. He’s going to see how far PRIRA can go.” She laughed cheerily and swiped a quick hand through the shimmering blue of her hair. “Boy, this shit is unbelievable.”
“That’s why we want to change tactics,” said Shane.
“To what?”
Shane gestured to Quinn, who seemed to once again realize she was part of the conversation and dipped a hand into the breast pocket of her jacket, removing a scrap of paper. She handed it to Bhattacharyya. She read it carefully, her eyes scanning down the list.
