Black Heart (11 page)

“What are we talking about here?” I ask.

“We want you to transform Patton.” She looks at me with her kind eyes, as if any answer I give will be the right one. She takes a sip of her coffee.

“Oh,” I say. For a moment I’m so shocked that her words just ring in my head.

But then I realize that of course this moment was going to come. Being a transformation worker is the most valuable thing about me—the reason they want me in the program, the reason that they let me get away with murder.

They let me get away with murder so that I can murder for them.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just surprised.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Yulikova says. “I know that you’re uncomfortable with what you can do.”

Agent Jones snorts, and she gives him a dark look.

When she turns back to me, there is still some of that anger in her eyes. “And I know what I’m asking isn’t easy. But we need for there to be no trace of him. This can’t seem to be an assassination.”

“Even though it is?” I say.

That seems to take her by surprise. “We’d like you to change him into a living creature. I understand that it would be possible for him to survive like that indefinitely. He won’t be dead. He’ll just be
contained
.”

Being caged, trapped like Lila was in her cat body, forever, seems as awful as death. But maybe it will let Yulikova sleep better at night.

She leans toward me. “I have gotten approval to make you an offer, in light of the huge service you’ll be doing for us. We’ll make the charges against your mother go away.”

Jones brings his hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “You’re making
another
deal with him? That family of his is slipperier than black ice on a highway.”

“Do I have to ask you to wait outside?” Her voice is steely. “This is a dangerous operation, and he isn’t even a part of the program yet. He’s seventeen years old, Ed. Let him have one less thing to worry about.”

Agent Jones looks from me to her and then away from both of us. “Fine,” he says.

“Here at the LMD we often say that heroes are the people who dirty their hands so other hands get to stay clean. We’re terrible so you don’t have to be. But in this case you do have to be—or at least we’re asking you to be.”

“What happens if I don’t agree—I mean to my mother?”

Yulikova picks off a piece of her muffin. “I don’t know. I’m authorized by my boss to offer you this, but he’s the one who would be making it happen. I suppose your mother could continue to evade justice or she could be picked up
and extradited—if she’s out of the state. I’d be afraid for her safety if she were locked up in any place Patton could get to.”

I am suddenly gripped with certainty that Yulikova knows exactly where my mother is.

They’re manipulating me. Yulikova letting me see how sick she is, saying nice things, making us sit down to lunch. Jones being such an asshole. It’s classic good cop–bad cop. Which isn’t to say that it’s not working.

Patton’s a bad guy and he’s out to get my mother. I want him stopped and I want her safe. I’m very tempted by anything that lets me have both. Plus there’s the fact that I’m backed into a corner. Mom needs a pardon.

And if I don’t trust my own instincts toward right and wrong, I have to trust someone’s. That’s why I wanted to join the government, right? So that if I was going to do bad things, it would at least be in the service of good people.

I am a weapon. And I have put myself in Yulikova’s hands.

Now I have to let myself be used as she sees fit.

I take a deep breath. “Sure. I can do that. I can work him.”

“Cassel,” says Yulikova. “I want you to understand that you can decline this job. You can tell us no.”

But I can’t. She’s seen to it that I really can’t.

Jones doesn’t say a single snarky thing.

“I understand.” I nod to show that I really do. “I understand, and I’m telling you yes.”

“This is going to be a very discreet mission,” Yulikova says. “A very small team operating with the tacit support of
my superiors—providing we can pull it off. Otherwise, they will disavow all knowledge. I will be running this—any questions should come directly to me. No one else needs to know. I trust I can count on both of your discretion.”

“You mean if something goes wrong, it could be our careers,” Jones says.

Yulikova takes another sip of her coffee. “Cassel isn’t the only one with a choice. You don’t need to be a part of this.”

Agent Jones doesn’t say anything. I wonder if it will hurt his career either way. I wonder if he even knows he’s playing the bad cop. I kind of suspect he doesn’t.

I eat my sandwich. A nurse pokes her head in and says that she’ll be bringing medicine in about ten minutes. Yulikova stands and starts gathering empty cups and tossing them into the wastebasket.

“I can do that,” I say, getting up and grabbing a sandwich wrapper.

She puts her gloved hands on my arms and looks into my eyes, like she’s trying to see the answer to a question she hasn’t asked. “It’s okay to change your mind, Cassel. At any time.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I tell her.

Her fingers tighten. “I believe you. I do. I’ll be in touch in a few days with more details.”

“Let’s not tire her out,” Jones says, frowning. “We should go.”

I feel bad leaving Yulikova with the mess, but now they’re both looking at me with the expectation that our interview is over. Jones walks to the door, and I follow him.

“Just for the record, I don’t like any of this,” Agent Jones says, his gloved hand on the door frame.

She nods once, like she’s acknowledging his words, but the ghost of a smile is on her mouth.

Their exchange makes me even more sure I made the right choice. If Agent Jones approved of what I was doing, that’s when I’d be worried.

I FOLLOW AGENT JONES
through the corridors of the hospital, but when I get to the parking lot, I’m done. The guy hates me. There’s no way I’m letting him take me back to the old house. I don’t want him talking to my grandfather again.

“I’m going to take off,” I tell him. “See you around.”

Agent Jones looks at me incredulously, then snorts. “You planning on walking?”

“I’ll call a friend.”

“Get in the car,” he growls, switching from amused to impatient in a single breath. There is something in his face that makes me even more certain that going with him is a bad idea.

“Make me,” I say. “I dare you.”

When he doesn’t actually lunge at me, I take out my cell phone and call Barron.

“Little brother,” he drawls, picking up on the first ring. “You
need
to leave school and join up with the Feds. Last night we raided a worker strip club, and I was knee-deep in naughty gloves. Did you know no one uses Velcro on tear-away gloves anymore? The new kind are held together by magnets so they just
slide
right off the hand—”

“That’s, uh, interesting,” I say. “But what I really need right now is a ride.”

“Where are you?” he asks.

I tell him the name of the hospital while Agent Jones watches me with a cold, furious look in his eyes. We don’t like each other. He should be
relieved
that he isn’t getting forced to spend any more time with me, but he’s obviously brimming with rage instead. The more I study his expression, the more unnerved I am. He’s not looking at me the way an adult looks at an obnoxious kid. He’s studying me the way a man studies his opponent.

I sit on the cold stoop and wait, letting the chill seep into my skin. It takes a while for Barron to show—long enough that I start wondering if I should call someone else. But just as I decide that I’m going to have to go inside and get something warm to drink or con a blanket from one of the nurses, Barron pulls up in a red Ferrari. He rolls down a dark tinted window and flashes me a grin.

“You stole that,” I say.

“Even better. This beautiful car was seized during a raid. Can you believe it? There’s a whole warehouse of stuff that gets confiscated and then just sits around until the paperwork is sorted out. Best warehouse ever. Come on, get in.”

I don’t need to be told twice.

Barron is looking very pleased with himself. “Not only did I manage to get myself some new wheels, but I filled up the trunk with a bunch of tins of caviar and bottles of Krug that were just sitting around. Oh, and some cell phones I am pretty sure I can resell. Altogether a pretty good Saturday. How about yourself?”

I roll my eyes, but I’m already relaxing in the warmth of the heater, leaning back against the seat. “I’ve got to tell you some stuff. Can we go somewhere?”

“Anywhere you like, kid,” Barron says.

Despite his extravagant offer, we wind up getting take-out Chinese and heading to his place in Trenton. He’s fixed it up some, replacing the broken windows he’d previously just covered in cardboard. He even bought some furniture. We sit on his new black leather sofa and put our feet up on the trunk he’s using for a coffee table. He passes me the tub of lo mein.

On the surface his place looks more normal than it used to, but when I go to the cabinet to get a glass, I see the familiar pattern of sticky notes on the fridge, reminding him of his phone number, his address, his name. Whenever he changes someone’s memories, blowback strips out some of his—and he can’t be sure which ones will go. He could lose something small, like his memory of eating dinner
the night before, or something big, like the memory of our father’s funeral.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

I’d like to believe that Barron has stopped working people, the way he promised he would, that all these little reminders are here because of habit or in case of an emergency—but I’m not an idiot. That warehouse wasn’t unguarded. I’m sure someone had to be made to “remember” paperwork that let Barron load up a car with whatever he wanted and drive it out of a government building. And then that same person had to be made to forget.

When I come back to the living room, Barron is mixing a concoction of duck sauce and hot mustard on his plate. “So what’s up?” he asks.

I explain about Mom and her failed attempt to sell Zacharov back his own diamond, and the long-standing affair she appears to have had with him. Then I realize I have to explain how she stole it in the first place.

Barron looks at me like he’s considering accusing me of lying. “Mom and Zacharov?”

I shrug. “I know. It’s weird, right? I’m trying really hard not to think about it.”

“You mean about the part that if Zacharov and Mom got married, that would make you and Lila brother and sister?” He starts laughing, falling back on the cushions.

I chuck a handful of white rice at him. A few of the grains stick to his shirt. More stick to my glove.

He keeps on laughing.

“I’m going to go talk to the forger tomorrow. Some guy up in Paterson.”

“Sure, we could do that,” he says, still giggling a little.

“You want to come?”

“Of course.” He opens the chicken with black bean sauce and dumps it over his mustard and duck sauce concoction. “She’s my mother too.”

“There’s something else I should tell you,” I say.

He pauses with his hand on a packet of soy.

“Yulikova asked me if I would be willing to do something. A job.”

He goes back to pouring out the sauce and taking a first bite. “I thought you couldn’t get put to work, since you haven’t officially joined up.”

“She wants me to take out Patton.”

Barron’s brows draw together. “
Take out?
As in transform him?”

“No,” I say. “As in
take out to dinner
. She thinks we’d make a good couple.”

“So you’re going to kill him?” He regards me carefully. Then he mimes a gun with his fingers. “Boom?”

“She didn’t tell me much about the plan, but—,” I start.

He throws back his head and laughs. “You should have joined the Brennans if you were just going to become an assassin anyway. We could have made a lot of money.”

“This is different,” I say.

Barron laughs and laughs. Now that he’s off again, there’s no stopping him.

I stab at the lo mein with my plastic fork. “Shut up. It is different.”

“Please at least tell me that you’re going to get paid,” he says when he manages to catch a breath.

“They said they’d get the charges against Mom dropped.”

“Good.” He nods. “Any cold hard cash going along with that?”

I hesitate, then have to admit, “I didn’t ask.”

“You have a skill. You can do something
no one else
can,” Barron says. “Seriously. You know what’s good about that? It’s
valuable
. As in you can trade it for goods or services. Or
money
. Remember when I said it was wasted on you? I was so right.”

I groan and shove rice into my mouth so that I don’t decide to dump the whole carton over his head.

After we finish eating Barron calls Grandad. He tells a long and complicated series of lies about the questions the federal agents asked and how we weaseled out of answering all of them through our inherent charm and wit. Grandad cackles down the line.

When I get on, Grandad asks me if any of what Barron said was true.

“Some,” I tell him.

He stays quiet.

“Okay, very little,” I finally admit. “But everything’s okay.”

“Remember what I said. This is your mother’s trouble, not yours. Not Barron’s, either. Both of you need to stay out of it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Is Sam still there? Can I talk to him?”

Grandad gives the phone to Sam, who still sounds groggy but not all that upset to be abandoned for most of the day and the rest of tonight.

“It’s okay,” he informs me. “Your grandfather is teaching me how to play poker.”

If I know Grandad, that means what he’ll really be teaching Sam is how to cheat.

Barron offers to let me take his bed, saying that he can sleep anywhere. I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that there are beds all over town for him to slip into or just that he’s not picky about sleeping on furniture, but I take the sofa so I don’t have to find out.