Lexicon (34 page)

“Eliot. Please.”

“Atwood knew,” he said. “She told me as much, many years later.”

“Please,” said Brontë.

“We thought we were being clever. Carrying on under their noses. And when . . . when we had to stop, we thought we did that in secret, too. We did it because we were terrified of being discovered. But they knew.”

Her eyes glimmered. “Why are you saying these things? Are you here to compromise me?”

“No,” he said. “God, no.”

“Then stop talking.”

“They persuaded us. Without saying a word.”

“There was no alternative, Eliot.”

“I don’t believe that anymore. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I have this idea that it would have been a girl,” he said. “I don’t know why. But I’ve thought that for a while. I find it hard to shake.”

Brontë put her face in her hands. “Stop talking.”

“She’d be grown now. A young woman.”

“
Stop!
”

“I’m sorry.” He caught himself. “I’m sorry.”

“I want you to leave.”

He nodded. He hesitated, almost apologized again, then moved to the door. Before he closed it, he glanced back, in case she’d looked up from her hands. But she hadn’t.

•   •   •

He landed in Damascus. Heat enveloped him the instant he stepped over the threshold of the airplane, a taste of Australia with a different scent. He made his way across the tarmac to the airport proper and submitted himself to the impatient eyes of various mustachioed officials. His papers were impeccable and so he was soon released into the main hall, which was large, framed with high, latticed keyhole-shaped windows, and even vaguely air-conditioned. A short man in a tight suit stood gripping a sign that read:

“I’m Eliot,” he said. “You are Hossein?”

The man nodded, extending his hand in the Western manner.

“
,” said Eliot. The man’s hand dropped. His face relaxed. “My plane is delayed,” Eliot said. “It is due in ten hours. You will wait here for it and that is what you will believe.” He could see the exit. There was no shortage of drivers on the pavement outside. “And when Yeats asks you what happened,” he said, “tell him I retired.”

•   •   •

Someone entered the room. She squeezed shut her eyes as soon as she realized, so was left with only the briefest impression: a square man in a dark suit, silver hair.

“Hello, Emily,” Yeats said.

She sat up. Her brain felt soft. Lee had been right: It was harder to marshal mental defenses while under physiological stress. She needed to think clearly but all she wanted was a sandwich.

“Lee is dead. You assumed, perhaps. But in case you were wondering about the possibility of last-minute medical heroics . . . no. He died. Another for your collection.”

“I’ll stop at one more.”

“No,” Yeats said. “You won’t. I think we both understand this. You are infected with a murderous impulse. You’ve managed to ameliorate this so far by plotting my demise. If you actually succeeded . . . well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Since you would inevitably begin to, well,
kill everyone
. I think you must realize this. You must plan to kill me. But you must not do it. Quite the conundrum.”

She wondered how quickly she could get off the bed and get her hands around Yeats’s throat. Probably not very fast. Probably to no great effect, even if she did. She needed to be smarter. This was her chance; she would not get him alone again. She needed her head to stop pounding.

“Was this a suicide mission? I don’t think so. It goes against your character. I think you came here with a plan to kill me and the vaguest hope that you would somehow be redeemed. For you are such an immediate girl. You live from opportunity to opportunity. Does that sound right?”

Maybe
, she thought. She didn’t know. She was hungry. She wondered where Eliot was.

“I’m founding a religion,” said Yeats. “I use the term
religion
loosely. But then, so does everyone. It’s rather a lot of work, even with the bareword, and once it’s done, that’s only the first step. So I won’t waste any further time. Here’s what’s going to happen. You will open your eyes. You will look at the bareword. I will say,
Forever serve my interests
.” He loomed closer, a shape she couldn’t quite bring into focus. “I see from your expression that this is unexpected. You thought you would be killed. A natural assumption. But what I realized, Emily, is that you have made yourself useful. You are skilled, resourceful, adaptable, and you have a kill order in your head that will be triggered in the event of my death. You are, in fact, the perfect bodyguard.”

“No. I won’t do that.”

“Of course you will. You have no way of stopping it.”

She bared her teeth, trying to rise from the bed. He was right. She was alone in a cell. She didn’t even have a bucket. But there had to be something. There had always been something before.

“As many people as I’ve enthralled, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who hates me quite this much. Which makes this rather fascinating, Emily, since, the brain being what it is, your mind will invent a series of rationalizations to justify why you’re choosing to serve me. How far will you bend in order to reach that place? That’s what raises my curiosity. I wonder whether the end result will still be able to be accurately called
you
.”

“I will kill you.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ll want to.”

“Stay back.” She thought she heard him approaching, and threw out her arms. “Stay back, you motherfucker!”

“I’m not going to grapple with you, Emily. You will open your eyes of your own volition. You will do this because you see there is no alternative.”

“Eliot,” she said. “I want to see Eliot.”

“I’m afraid Eliot is in Syria. He flew out last night.”

“Tell him I’m here.”

“Oh, Emily,” said Yeats. “He already knows.”

She didn’t want to believe him. But she couldn’t find falsehood in his voice.
Eliot
, she thought.
Eliot, you were my last hope.

“Open your eyes, please,” Yeats said, and she began to shake very badly, because she was going to do it.

word
(w α : d)

(noun)

1. a single distinct meaningful unit of language

2. a basic unit of data in a computer

3. something spoken or written:
a word of warning

4.
(with negative)
the smallest amount of something spoken or written:
don’t believe a word of it

5. contentious or angry speech:
he had words with her

6. a command, password, or signal:
she gave the word to begin

7. one’s account of the truth:
her word against his

8. a promise or assurance:
I give you my word I’ll return

[FOUR]

“So you left her,” Harry said.

Eliot rubbed his forehead. His throat was sore; he had been talking for some time. It was taxing, because he was recovering from a near-death experience and outside the window forces were gathering to kill him. “That’s what you get from that story? That I left?” Harry didn’t respond. “Yes. I left. There was no alternative.”

“There’s always an alternative.”

“Well,” he said. He felt tired. “It didn’t feel like it.”

“What then?”

“Yeats sent her after me. I had this crazy idea that I’d be left alone if I went far enough away. That I could start a new life. But she came after me and systematically murdered everyone who was in the way.”

“She’s probably compromised.”

“You think that makes a difference?”

“Yes,” said Harry, “because I can
un-
compromise her, with the bareword.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t erase an instruction. Not even with that. You would only create conflicting instructions.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s unpredictable.”

“Well, that’s fucking something.”

“The original instruction won’t go anywhere. It could reassert itself at any moment, based on situational factors, such as where she is, how she’s feeling. Do you want to take that chance when one of the instructions is
kill everyone
?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you fucking can’t.”

A low thrumming began outside. Harry peered out the window at the sky. “I love her.”

He shook his head. “You’re misremembering.”

“I remember that.”

“Listen to me carefully,” Eliot said, “because over the last twelve months, I have been highly motivated to figure out exactly what happened in Broken Hill, and as a result I know for a fact that your movements diverged from hers shortly after she left me facedown in a ditch. What I pieced together from this was that when she went to you and asked you to leave with her, you said no. This is how I first began to suspect your existence as an outlier. And it’s how I know you didn’t love her.”

“You said people are defined by what they want. That it’s the most important thing about them. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I know who I am.”

He looked out the window. “Well, terrific. That’s terrific, Wil. I’m so glad you could find your emotional core, before your ex-girlfriend murders us. Imagine what would happen if she got her hands on a bareword again. Imagine that.”

“I’ll keep it from her.”

“Okay,” said Eliot, “well, now we’re entering a magical fantasy land, because with all due respect to your newly regained assertiveness, you don’t have a hope in hell of keeping her from anything she wants. What’s that noise?”

“Choppers.”

“More than one? What do they look like?”

“Why would she do anything to help this guy Yeats? She
must
be compromised. He’s
making
her chase us and you say she has to die for it.”

“You think I like it?”

“Yes. I do. Because of Charlotte.”

He looked at the ceiling. “Well,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

“So?”

“So it doesn’t matter. Is it Woolf’s choice? Maybe not, but she is what she is. You, right now, are shooting at people for the crime of being compromised. Why is Woolf different? Also, may I add, she wasn’t made this way out of nowhere. Yeats sowed that seed in fertile ground.”

Harry raised his voice over the din of the choppers. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning she wiped out Broken Hill!”

“Maybe she was compromised
then
!”

“You’re choosing what you want to believe! Christ! I would love to believe that I didn’t let three thousand people die because I couldn’t see her for what she was. But I can’t. The truth is she was always like this and I refused to see it.”

“I tell you what, how about we kill
Yeats
?”

“Sure, we’ll ask Woolf to stand aside for a minute. Don’t look at me like that’s a realistic possibility. She’ll defend him to the death. And even if she could be circumvented somehow, Yeats being alive is what keeps Woolf in check. Remove him and she’s left with an instruction to
kill everyone
.”

Harry was watching out the window. The loudness of the choppers seemed to have leveled.

“You want a nightmare scenario? Yeats goes down, Woolf takes the bareword. Yeats cannot die. Not before Woolf.” Harry didn’t react. “What’s happening out there?”

“Guys coming out of choppers.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Military. Big black helmets with goggles. Can’t see their faces.”

“Ah,” said Eliot. “So we are completely fucked, then.”

Harry looked at him.

“Environmentally Isolated Personnel. They see the world through filters, to protect them against compromise.”

“Should I shoot them?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

Harry raised the rifle. A part of the window frame near his head exploded. He ducked against the wall. “Shit.”

“Yes,” Eliot said.

Harry moved to the other window, checked outside. “They’re encircling us.”

“I would imagine they’re landing on the roof, too,” Eliot said. “Rappelling down from the choppers, perhaps.”

“What happened to Charlotte?”

“What?”

“When I met you, you had a buddy. A whole bunch of guys, on that ranch. Including Charlotte. How did they get there?”

“Who gives a shit?” Eliot said. “Honestly, Harry. At this point, who cares? You think they’re going to take us alive?”

Harry rubbed his chin, a gesture Eliot hadn’t seen before. “Under the mattress.”

“What?”

“I got you a pistol from the armory. It’s under the mattress.”

Eliot stared at him.

“You want to maybe get it out?”

“I maybe want to shoot you with it, if it would make any difference.”

“It’s going to be all right, Eliot.”

“No,” said Eliot, “these guys are going to kill us while Woolf watches from a distance. Sometime later, an unimaginable number of people are going to devote their lives to shifting dirt, because Yeats has developed a hankering to dig a very deep hole in one place and pile it up in another. That’s how it’s going to be, you stupid asshole. Those guys on the ranch? They were the ones I could persuade to leave the organization. I thought Charlotte was one of them, but it has since become abundantly clear that she was compromised by Woolf, and feeding back information, such as your existence, what we were planning, and so on, the entire time, and then she turned Charlotte against me and I had to shoot her! I had to fucking shoot her, Wil!”

“Just get out the gun.”

“Why bother?” he shouted. “Since Woolf is coming only to shower us with chocolates and kisses?”

Harry paced.

“Oh,” Eliot said. “Oh, oh, are we having regrets?”

“Shut up.”

“Twenty years,” Eliot said. “My entire adult life, I’ve guarded every word that’s come out of my mouth. And you know what? I’m done. I am finally, completely fucking done. So hey-o! Fuck you, Wil Parke! Harry Wilson! Whoever you are! Fuck you very much! And fuck you, Yeats! And you, Emily Woolf! Fuck you the most of all!” He threw back the blanket. He slid a hand beneath the mattress and found metal. “Let’s go!” His body hurt everywhere but his mind was soaring. “Here we go, hey-o, diddle diddle!”

•   •   •

Emily came out of the chopper and jogged to the shelter of a falling-down building that had once sold wire, apparently. She had forgotten about stores like this. Shops, she meant. Shops that only sold one thing, which you could not conceive of wanting. You could live a lifetime in DC and never see a wire store. If you wanted wire, you would go to a warehouse-style hypermarket and it would be one shelf in aisle twelve. But here it was a whole shop. You went in and asked for some wire, because the roos had knocked down a section of your side paddock fence again, and you would have a conversation about it.

She hadn’t wanted to come back to Broken Hill. She had been operating for a while now as a compartmentalized person, putting different pieces of herself in different places, and she didn’t know what Broken Hill would do to that. But she was here, because she didn’t get to make choices about that kind of thing anymore, and had to do the best she could. One part of her, one of the compartments, was glad. It thought she was coming home. The rest was pretty freaked out.

“We’re deploying,” said Plath. Plath was running around with a headset that wouldn’t stay put, talking to security guys. Emily was not very happy with Plath. She had crossed paths with Plath a few times and each time Plath was more neurotic. There was something wild and jumpy in her eyes that Emily did not trust. Also, Plath had come on board shortly after the terrible failed attempt to corner Eliot and his outlier at the Portland airport, during which the poet Raine had died, and although Plath hadn’t said anything, Emily knew she viewed that incident as a shameful fuckup on Emily’s part. “It’s so hot.” Plath began to extract herself from her jacket. Emily was not wearing a jacket, because it had been obvious in advance that the desert would be hot. “Like an
oven
.”

“Yes.” She watched Plath get her jacket tangled up in her headset.

“I’ll call Yeats, tell him we landed.”

“No.”

“He asked to be kept up to—”

“Don’t call Yeats,” Emily said. She was still in charge. She was still the best in the organization at hunt-and-kill.

“We need a command center,” said a man. His voice was machine modulated, coming out of a helmet. His name was Masters. He was in control of the soldiers. Currently, Masters had EIPs spreading through Broken Hill like a toxic spill, establishing perimeters, getting fixes, whatever else it was they did. It was to help her neutralize Eliot, but she didn’t like it, being around people she couldn’t compromise.

She remembered a burger place. It was a good distance from the hospital, close enough to coordinate the action but not so close that Eliot was likely to be able to sneak up and shoot her. She had eaten there, alone, sometimes, other times not. But she wasn’t thinking about that. Harry was trying to surface in her brain but she was not going to let him. The point was, it was a good location. “I know somewhere.”

A small squad swept the burger place while she and Plath stood outside, shielding their faces from the sun. A chopper passed overhead, whipping up hot, stinging sand. “Ugh,” said Plath. “This place.”

A soldier opened the rear door and gestured. She passed through a small kitchen, where a dark skillet lay under a layer of dust. Utensils dangled from overhead racks, surprisingly bright. Then she was in the serving area, passing familiar tables. There were no bodies. Maybe the soldiers had removed them. Plath hung back for some reason but Emily moved to the front of the store. There were dark shapes outside, hard to see through the dirty plate glass, and she approached with some trepidation. Outdoor tables. A ragged umbrella still over one of them. A few cars. If she put her face to the glass, she could see farther down the street. She didn’t look for detail but could see the shape of the hospital. Somewhere inside were Eliot and his outlier.

Her phone rang. She pulled it out. “I hear you’re in Broken Hill,” said Yeats.

“Yes.” She looked at Plath, the snitch.

“I find myself wondering why Eliot would go there, of all places.”

“Well, my guess is to get the word,” she said. “The outlier can just pick it up.” There was silence. “Hello?”

“I’m sorry. I was rendered speechless a moment, just then.”

“The bareword,” she said. “It’s in the emergency room.”

“I
have
the bareword.”

“You have the copy I made. The original is still there.”

“How useful it would have been to have this information before this moment.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She had known that, in one of her compartments.

“You will kill Eliot,” Yeats said, “and the outlier, and, for that matter, anyone else Eliot has managed to conjure up who doesn’t work directly for me. You will then cordon off the hospital until I arrive. Is this clear?”

“Yes.” In her head, she added:
you jerk
. She did this sometimes. It was a kind of game.

“I really am vexed by this outlier business. I have felt decidedly uncomfortable, knowing that one exists. It is a most unwelcome distraction to my work.”

“I can imagine.”
You jerk.

“Call me when Eliot’s dead,” he said. “I won’t set foot in Broken Hill until then. Oh, and Emily? At some point, you will fill me in on exactly how you managed to copy an object you can’t look at.”

“I will do that,” she said. The phone clicked. Her jaw worked and for a moment she thought she was actually going to say it. But she only made a little grunt,
yuh
. She glanced at Plath. But no one seemed to have noticed. So that was okay.

In the beginning, she hadn’t even been able to think it. Perhaps eventually she would be able to say the words to his face.
Hey, Yeats! You’re a jerk!
It was a fun idea. Implausible; most likely, this was as far as it could go, a mental game. She would see. For now, the important thing was that a part of her was still her.

•   •   •

Eliot strode to the door, pulled it open, and disappeared. This happened much more quickly than Harry expected, because until a few moments ago, Eliot had looked very much like a guy recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound. What had suddenly revived him, Harry did not know. “Wait,” he said. But Eliot was running down the corridor; Harry could hear his footsteps.

He hefted the rifle. This was going to be especially useless for close-quarters combat. He hadn’t intended to leave the room. He’d intended to stay and pick off guys until Emily got the message and came to see him. He blew air through his teeth. “Fuck,” he said, and went after Eliot. He jogged down the corridor, passing two neonatal rooms that were once staffed by a woman named Helen who’d always had pink iced doughnuts, any time of day or night. Harry had never seen her eat one. She just had them. He’d visited this place often, for those doughnuts.

He reached the corner and poked his head around. Eliot was nowhere to be seen. He had just fucking disappeared. Harry debated the merits of opening his mouth to make the kind of noise that might attract armed men, then there was a quick one-two of flat gunshots in the near distance, which decided him.