Silhouette (11 page)

“… And it seems that the James Bond of BASS is looking more like a Benedict Arnold,” Harris was saying when the clip began, with the usual nausea-inducing, ADHD-directed visuals flashing and swirling around him. He began singing again: “
Ooooh, really makes me wonder
if he had something to do with the recent Death By Dissection of his immediate superior! Nooooo, that could never be, right? A war hero confined to an office job could never get itchy for more action or power, would he? Naaaaaah. Don't worry about this Dark Knight, folks—just hope to Hades that he doesn't want
your
job.”

A little hand from one of his tattoos stretched out to make a huge one, which pointed at the viewer.

“And as for you,
Mikey Mouse
, when they put you away in that overgrown dungeon formerly known as a church, well, What More Can I Say?…
Don't bend over for the soap!”

As he was laughing hysterically, the clip of me came on. It was a close-up from a room in the castle that I didn't recognize immediately, and this is what I was saying:

“I'm sick of this place. I'd like to burn it down. I'm sick of the old man, and I'd like to slit his throat and drink his blood.”

It was me, no question. And I even remembered saying it.

 

9

On the way to the city, I made a few calls to various departments regarding the murder investigation. The circulating video clip made me even more uneasy than I already was, because it made me look like a loose cannon, and I was afraid that someone might make a connection between me and D's death before Paul and I could confront the old man. I had experienced similar smears before, but none when I was actually guilty of a crime. So I tried to look busy about finding the killer. There were no leads yet, of course.

The disk with the incriminating image on it was burning a hole in my datafold, but so far I had thought of only one way to dispose of it safely, and that would have to wait, for now. I couldn't ask Harris about the black op at this time, because if he knew anything more about it, his comments might be overheard, and if he didn't know anything, I wouldn't feel as good about what I was planning to do to him.

By the time I reached the castle, I was fairly sure where and how the incriminating video clip of me had been taken. So I parked the aero, rode the elevators, and passed through two security checkpoints until I reached our executive lounge. Once there, I tried to recall where we had each been sitting during the conversation, and which camera would have captured me from the angle in the clip. When I was fairly sure it was the visible camera (a nickel-size protrusion high on one wall) rather than the hidden one, I headed for Internal Security.

Upon entering the ISec floor, I paused for a moment, then walked to Tara's office, feeling the usual mixture of pleasure and guilt, but with an extra dose of guilt this time.
She is the most appropriate contact for this,
I rationalized, and then felt more guilty for having to explain myself to myself. Before I could ring her door, she appeared behind me.

“Can I help you, Mr. Ares?” her voice said. I turned, and tried not to notice how good she looked. Instead of drinking in her milk-chocolate skin and dark brown hair, I tried to picture Lynn's pale white and streaked gold. Tara's handsome frame, almost as tall as mine, was harder to ignore, as were the memories that immediately flooded into my mind. I had managed to delete some through time and practice, but others were harder to erase. And seeing her reminded me of D, who had taken great pleasure in congratulating me for “expediting the process of evolution” by dating one of “his people.” I had pointed out to him on several occasions that Tara's mother was almost white, to which he had shrugged and pronounced it a “transitional stage.”

My rush of emotions must have shown through, at least slightly, because she cocked her head and looked at me curiously, but also hopefully. “I would really like to help you,” she finished with a caring smile. For some reason, this sparked the odd feeling of anger that was hanging around inside me, which in this situation actually helped me to regain my composure and stay focused on the business at hand.

“Yes, you can, in fact,” I said tersely. “I want you to find me something in the camera room.” She concealed her feelings about as well as I had, saying, “Follow me, then,” through a disappointed sigh.

A few moments later, we were seated in front of a bank of screens as the software searched through years of digital video to find the images we wanted. While she was setting up the search by fiddling with the hardware around us, she glanced over at me almost as much as she looked at the equipment, and she leaned across me a few times to reach some of it. She did that exactly two times, to be precise, and I did notice her nearness more than I wanted to admit. I tried to think of Lynn again, not wanting to add to my already overwhelming load of guilt.

The system must have found the keys it had been given, because a screen in front of us flashed on, showing a scene of three men reclining and talking in the executive lounge. It was shot from the camera I had seen, which was looking down on Paul, D, and me from its spot on the wall. I told Tara to rewind it, and we watched the whole discussion:

“… But she didn't know,” D said. “I'll check again in a few days.”

“That reminds me,” I offered. “I talked to Franken yesterday.” I noticed that I was smoking one of those legal cigarettes, though as usual I didn't seem to be enjoying it very much. I had given up the real ones—finally—when I came aboard BASS's tight ship.

“What did he say?” Paul asked. I took a moment to respond, trying to remember the exact words.

“‘I'm sick of this place. I'd like to burn it down. I'm sick of the old man, and I'd like to slit his throat and drink his blood.'”

Paul and D looked at each other and snickered. “I'm not surprised,” Paul said. “He's on about ten different drugs, the second five balancing the first five—you know how it goes. He can't be held responsible for his actions right now, but he also can't be an agent anymore.”

“Let him go, and give him a class-C,” Darien suggested, looking at Paul, who nodded.

I told Tara to pause it, and asked her how someone had gotten a close-up of me. “Like this,” she answered as she zoomed in the view so that only my face was on the screen, the smoke floating in front of it. “Then they just copied it.” It occurred to me that the smoke made me seem even more dangerous, because no one who saw the clip would know that the fake cancer stick was legal.

“So how many people could have done this?” I asked.

“You can count them on your hand—that I know. You saw how I needed your codes to access the upper levels.” She reached forward and touched the tops of each of my fingers lightly, starting with the little one, as she named the suspects. “Rabin Senior, Rabin Junior, Anthony, and you.” She touched the last finger a little longer, stretching out the word. Then she tapped my thumb. “Maybe the big bodyguard, I don't know. Because the old man has a personal security room upstairs in his suite, you know, with access to all the cameras. There's always at least a few of us here, so someone would have noticed if one of you big shots came in and was fiddling around with the database.”

She thought for a few seconds, then nodded. “I would say the clip came from the penthouse terminal.”

I knew that the only ones who had access to that equipment were the Rabins, so it was clear that the likeliest suspect was the old man. I also remembered that Harris had called me James Bond in his commentary on the video, which was Saul's pet name for me. But why would the old man want to leak this clip and make me look bad to the public? So no one would believe me if I uncovered his shadow project? And how had he come across that exact portion of the tapes? Had he searched the security archives for hours and hours just to find something incriminating? Or did he sit up there in his dark tower, watching us constantly and remembering everything we said?

“Thank you, Tara,” I said, getting up to leave. “You've been a big help.”

She put her hands on the fronts of my thighs as they were rising, and gently pushed them back down onto the chair. Then she leaned close.

“Michael, losing your daughter has got to be so hard for you,” she said softly, but with a slight gleam in her eye where there should have been a tear. “This is when you need me the most.” She moved even closer. Her hands still rested on my legs, and now our knees were touching. “Everyone will understand, with what you're going through and all.”

“Lynn won't understand,” I said, my mouth going dry. Tara bristled visibly, which made me feel bad because I was making her feel bad. This was the merry-go-round I couldn't seem to get off—I knew that I needed to finalize this, for the good of us all. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, because I feared hurting her. And there was also that motivation I had finally admitted to myself, that I liked the fact that she was waiting for me. She was just such a perfect specimen of a woman—physically, at least—only an object to me, yes, but almost overpowering in her raw appeal. Then again, that was exactly what Lynn was not—an object. Lynn was my friend, and the mother of my little girl.…

The thought of Lynette caused the anger to flare again, and once again it distracted me from the other feelings that were flowing. I reached down to pull Tara's hands off me, but when I lifted them, she managed to clasp them together with mine. I didn't want to jerk them apart, so now, despite my best efforts, we were holding hands in public.

“Don't you have another man, after all this time?” I asked, not knowing where else to go.

“I've had many, actually,” she answered. “But they're not you.” She squeezed my hands and leaned closer. “I know you can never forget me.”

“That may be, but—” A tech walked by near us, holding his head rigidly straight in a rather conspicuous manner. “Could I have my hands back, Tara?” She bristled again, but let go.

You cannot have my hands because they don't belong to you,
I should have said.
You will never have my hand or any part of me again. It's over. Forever. If you have to get another job, get another job. Maybe I will.
But I didn't say that, gutless fool that I am. Instead, I tried to take the sting out of it for her, and added, “This isn't the place for that, right?”

She sat back in her chair and assumed a more professional demeanor.

“I relive that night last year over and over again,” she said. “It was great, even though it was missing one important thing.”

We had gone out to dinner and caught half a concert at Golden Gate Park, spending most of the time talking on the steps of one of the nearby museums. She had asked me out many times before, and I always had an excuse to say no, but for some reason that night I had agreed to go with her. When she wanted to drive me to her place rather than back to the castle, however, I told her it was too late, and she said if I kept telling her no, then someday it
might
be too late. I had to actually open the door and step out of the car a couple of blocks from the castle and walk the rest of the way, because she seemed unable to bring herself to drop me off there.

“Tara,” I said, leaning forward and pushing my chair back a little.
It's over. It's over. That means it's over. O-V-E-R. Don't talk to me again, don't wait for me. I love my wife
.… “I have so much on my mind right now,” was what I actually said. “We need to talk sometime. But now is not the time.” I pushed myself up and out of the chair before she could intervene, and took a step away.

“Okay, let's talk,” she said hopefully.

I cleared my throat, nodded, and walked away, determined not to look back.

I hit the nearest elevator and headed for the Confinement Center. On my way, I made a few calls to put the finishing touches on the Red Tunnel assault plan, priming a veritable army of bugs, falcons, mirrored tanks, and armored peacers who were now either on call or already in position.

As I rode the underground walkway connecting the castle to its neighboring building, I looked up at the cathedral through the transteel ceiling, which was reflective on the other side, providing more light at night for the courtyard on the surface. The charcoal-gray towers and reliefs of the old Gothic building were even more impressive from this far down—the view serving as a reminder to BASS employees about how lucky they were, and where they could end up if they ever crossed their employer … like I was planning to do.

*   *   *

The private conference room where I met Korcz was well inside the cathedral, but not as far as the cells themselves, which were in the very center, stretching down about ten stories below the ground. The husky, pockmarked man looked sober and worried, but I could tell he was glad to be free of the isolation of his cubicle, even though he'd only been in for less than a day. Saul Rabin's philosophy of incarceration differed significantly from the conventional wisdom that had developed during the last century, where inmates were allowed to live together in increasingly comfortable environments. The Mayor, on the other hand, thought that jail should be a place where one did
not
want to go, or stay. This retro-historical approach had caught on with a few of the new prisons here in the West, to which we happily sent the criminals who dared to defy any of our rules or simply needed a longer lesson.

“No one has told me anything.” Korcz spoke first, his Euro-Russian accent muffled just slightly by the porous transteel wall between us. He wore a big bandage behind his ear, where my stopper had hit him. “I do not know why I am here. I do not know when I am leafing.”

“Shouldn't you say ‘if' you are leaving?” I said. “You did resist arrest. Under city law, as you well know, we could have killed you when you drew your guns.”