Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (44 page)

Zoey said, “Am I supposed to be terrified that weapons like that exist out in the wild, or rooting for it to work?”

No one answered. Everyone was riveted, eyes locked on the feed as the missile ate up the distance between it and the Fire Palace.

The pilot said, “One kilometer to target. Nine hundred meters. Eight hundred. Seven hu—Whoa, what the—?”

Suddenly, the skyline jerked to the right, as if the missile had taken a hard left turn.

“Veering off course, thirty-two degrees, trying to correct.” A pause of a few seconds, and then, “Controls unresponsive.”

The view turned and turned, then the horizon froze in the view screen and the missile screamed forward.

“Initiating self-destruct,” said the pilot. Then a few seconds later, “No response. We've lost control of the unit. Damn it, Daryl, I told you this was a bad idea.”

Zoey said, “Oh my god, is that thing just flying wildly into the city somewhere?”

Echo shook her head. “Worse. I think Molech's men took control of it.”

Zoey went cold. “Where are they sending it?” The real question she wanted answered was,
Are they sending it here?

Blink switched to exterior shots of the missile, hopping from one feed to the next as it streaked past random drones in the night and flashed in between skyscrapers. It turned once more, then arced down toward its destination.

Budd said, “Jesus.”

Will said, “It's heading for the hospital.”

Zoey thought that somewhere she could hear Molech laughing.

The missile screamed down, leaving a yellow gash in the night sky, the massive white building filling its view screen.

It impacted the parking lot in front of the hospital, erupting in a towering ball of blooming orange fire that could probably be seen from Fort Drayton. They heard the explosion first on Blink, then a second later it echoed in from the distance outside the kitchen window. Zoey jumped both times. She had no idea if Molech landed it in the parking lot out of mercy, or just misjudged the approach.

Will turned away from the feed and said, “Like Zulus swarming a tank.”

Zoey said, “What do we do, Will?
What the hell do we do?
”

Will thought for a moment and then said, “I guess now would be a good time to tell you what we were doing before we met your father.”

 

FORTY-NINE

Will said, “Do you know what PSYOPS are?”

Zoey made herself take her eyes off of the feed and said, “It's some kind of secret military thing, right? I think I saw a movie about it once but I fell asleep during a romance subplot.”

“It's psychological operations. Mind games, with the enemy, to try to win the war without firing a shot. Andre, Budd, and I all did work with the Eighth Military Information Support Group. On the private side—we were contractors, no official connection to the U.S. government, so it'd be easy to disown us if we ever got caught. Fifteen years ago, we were all in North Korea, during the insurgency that our government was not supporting in any official capacity, while pulling every unofficial trick in the book.”

“And Arthur was in on this?”

“No, Arthur was there, for … business.”

“Right, I don't want to know.” She looked at Echo. “What was your job?”

“Well, I was in fourth grade at the time, so…”

“At the time,” interrupted Will, “the insurgency was falling apart, but the regime didn't know that. Our objective was to try to convince the North Korean government that the rebels were much stronger than they actually were, to try to force them to the negotiating table. We knew they were paranoid that the rebels had gained the support of the Chinese, which if true would have spelled doom for the regime. It wasn't true, but our job was to convince them it was. You follow so far?”

It occurred to Zoey that you could really get Will talking if you turned the subject to how much smarter he was than everybody else. Andre took two of the coffee drinks from the bar, and sat down next to Will. On the feed, fire trucks were swarming the hospital parking lot.

Zoey said, “Yeah. You want something to drink?”

“Can you make hot tea? I want the simplest possible cup of hot tea you can make. Nothing fancy.”

“Coming right up.”

“Now,” Will continued, “I don't know how familiar you are with the war or international politics in general, but the leaders of North Korea were a succession of increasingly insane and paranoid despots with a swarm of angry wasps where their brains should have been. That was our advantage—if we dropped the right hints, the regime would believe
anything
. So, the first step was to just allow a large cache of insurgent weapons to get captured. Gear left out in the rain, unguarded, so the regime could sweep in and seize it all without firing a shot. Can you think of why we would do that?”

Zoey said, “It's creating the impression you didn't need it, right? Like a poor dude blowing his whole paycheck on a date, so the girl thinks he's richer than he is?”

“Exactly. If the insurgents can afford to leave
this
just lying around, imagine what they must have elsewhere.”

“But that's a huge waste if the bad guys didn't happen to notice it.”

“Always assume your enemies are more clever than you give them credit for—even an animal can think several steps ahead. Which means if you want them to believe a lie, you don't need to jam it down their throat. You just leave them a trail of bread crumbs, and let them believe they arrived at the conclusion against your will. But it all starts with this one fundamental principle: find out what the enemy is most afraid of, and you'll also find what they're the most eager to believe.”

Zoey slid the tea over to Will. It was a cup of her Cthulhu Tea—a clear mug displaying three layers of different-colored hot tea flavors with gold at the bottom, fading to blood-red, and then into midnight blue at the top, like a sunset. A few drops of Baileys cream were dabbed onto the surface with a thin straw, where it dripped down into the tea, hanging in the dark blue liquid like the white, dangling tentacles of an unholy creature reaching down from the heavens. It was the single most elaborate drink Zoey knew how to make.

Will said, “Thank you. I think.”

Andre piped up. “Now, my favorite part of that whole operation, or rather, what would have been my favorite part had it worked—”

Will held up a hand. “We don't need to go over this part—”

Budd said, “I reckon we do.”

“This is all still technically classified, I've already said too much—”

“My favorite part,” said Andre, talking over him, “was Will came up with this idea to make a death ray.”

Budd picked up a coffee cup and said, “Now, we gotta give you some quick context here. Not to drown you in a bunch of geopolitical rigmarole or anything, but it was right around then that the Chinese were experimentin' with high-energy weapons—lasers and microwaves and all that Star Wars nonsense. So we start spreadin' rumors that the rebels had a Chinese handheld microwave gun that could penetrate even the most advanced armor. Now, this was important because the regime's tanks were mostly a weapon of intimidation. The sound of them tracks clanking down the street, flattening parked cars, and smashin' through walls—their psychological impact was way more important than their strategic value. So you can imagine how that would change the game if an insurgent had, let's say, a handheld rifle that could make a tank go up like a firework with a squeeze of the trigger.”

Will said impatiently, “Budd, none of this is helping her understand the oper—”

“I've got the floor here. So, we reckon we'll make one of these Martian death rays. Not a real one—such a thing didn't exist at the time—but one that was convincing enough to scare the pants off Pyongyang. Now in the real world, you can't see a laser—guy squeezes the trigger on this end, somethin' blows up downrange. Keep that in mind. So anyway, we start staging the whole thing, set to take place in the middle of a shopping district, where there'd be lots of cell phone cameras there to capture it all. So Will here, and remember he was only your age at the time, he finds a toy store and buys of one of them giant plastic squirt guns, the ones with the big tanks of water on top. And we take it to the safehouse and paint it, modify it, put real tactical sites on it—really make it look like something that would come out of the PLA's advanced weapons lab. Then he has an insurgent bombmaker craft for us an antitank satchel charge, but modified. It'd be full of copper sulfate—a chemical you can get from the hardware store—which burns bright green, like this is some kind of crazy alien weapon we've got here. So, we had it set up where a runner would stick the satchel charge to the tank—it had magnets inside it, see—and the bomb would be detonated by cell phone, so it was as simple as embedding the phone into the handle of the fake death-ray rifle. Then the gunman would wait for the tank to rumble up, squeeze the ‘trigger,' and watch the tank erupt in a beautiful green fireball, for the world to see. Boom, instant death ray. It would've been amazing. Had it worked.”

Will made a grunting sound.

Zoey said, “What do you means, ‘had it worked'?”

Will said, “It's not important, what matters is you understand the importance of—”

“The gunman was the weak link,” said Andre, as if remembering it fondly. “The first part of the plan worked pretty good, but remember, for this to all play out, he had to get in point blank, so the people recording it on their phones could get the ‘death ray' and the tank in the same shot. So the gunman blows the tank and it burns green, looks great.”

“But,” continued Budd, “he then turns to hightail it out of there and immediately trips over his own feet. His super-advanced death ray shatters under him like the hollow plastic toy that it is. He gets snatched up by regime troops and within an hour, all of us were in custody.”

“Holy crap! You got taken prisoner by the North Korean army?”

Andre nodded. “Uh huh. Got thrown into this holding area behind razor wire, bunch of starving POWs in there. Ain't never seen anything like it. Don't want to see anything like it again, neither.”

“How'd you get away?”

Andre said, “Your daddy. He was in country on, you know, business and had connections. To make a long story short, he sneaked us across the border and if he hadn't, we'd have been hung from a bridge. Arthur tracked us down back in the States a bit later, asked if we wanted to go to work for him. The rest is history.”

Zoey asked, “What happened to the other guy?”

“Which other guy?”

“The moron with the gun, who tripped and ruined the whole thing?”

Budd nodded toward Will. “Why don't you ask him? Fella's sittin' right here.”

Zoey laughed, then stopped laughing and said, “We are so screwed.”

Budd said, “Well, we got a special delivery comin'. I reckon it might change your mind.”

 

FIFTY

That night, she had another Jezza dream.

This time she was back in her old greasy apartment again, in the bathtub that was so tiny that even short Zoey had to keep her knees out of the water if she wanted to get her top half under it. The door opened and there was Jezza—only now, in the dream, he was half man, half machine, his eyes replaced by tiny whirring blades like from a blender, his arms bundles of wires and gears. Looming over the tub, grabbing Zoey by the neck and forcing her under the surface, the water burning down her nostrils and flowing down her throat, tasting like soap and bath salts, Zoey clawing at his face while she drowned an inch away from air …

Zoey awoke and sat up, splashing water in every direction and startling Stench Machine, who went skittering across the bathroom tile. She wiped water from her eyes and spent ten seconds trying to remember where she was.

She had fallen asleep in a bathtub that was twice as long as the one she was used to, and without the other end to brace her, had slid under the surface. The tub was in yet another of the guest rooms at the Casa de Zoey, a luxurious device that kept the water heated at a constant temperature, lit the room with simulated candlelight, and generated aromatherapy scents according to whatever mood it detected you were in. The inside of the tub was covered in a layer of some kind of clear gel that molded to your body, so you didn't have hard fiberglass pressing against your tailbone if you tried to sit up. Zoey wondered if there would be a perfect mold of her butt after she got out.

It was the middle of the night, about twelve hours after the events at Livingston Tower that left it a three-story-tall pile of steel beams and concrete in the center of a ten-block-wide lake of scattered glass. The bath had been Andre's idea, something he says they teach in the army, to deal with the immediate aftermath of combat trauma. When you get a moment of safety, they say, take time to do the human basics: bathing, grooming, eating, sleeping. Oh, and breathing—that slow, steady breathing, from the belly. You stay tensed up and alert all the time, Andre said, and you wind up frying those circuits in your brain, rendering them useless (“Or slowly drinking yourself to death, like Will here.”).

Zoey stepped out of the guest room (and yes, the tub did in fact have a butt indentation after she got out) and found Wu patiently standing guard outside her door.

At the sight of her he said, “Ms. Ling was looking for you. There is activity in the ballroom.”

“Okay, do you mean an actual ballroom where people hold dances, or that room with the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit?” Zoey imagined Will, Echo, and the rest flopping around in there among the colored balls, like a bunch of kids at a birthday party.

“The former, I would assume.”

“All right, didn't know I had one of those. Do you have any idea where it is?”