Root of Unity (13 page)

But Checker had most likely gotten those coordinates from cell phone tracking, and I didn’t know how accurate his methods were—even if he found the location to within a few feet, a few more feet of inaccuracy began multiplying the search area into hopelessness. Not to mention the possibility Arthur had moved, or run, or tried to take shelter—

Please let him have taken shelter.

I stumbled toward the remainder of the building, the soles of my boots turning on the debris. I hiked up into the pile of rubble the place had become, trying not to think, the geographic grid overlaying itself for me. There, there was where his cell signal had come from. At least, where it had come from more than half an hour ago.

I closed my eyes against the grit and did the last thing in the world I wanted to: I recalled the structure to my mind as I had seen it from the air and rewound the explosion.

My memory wasn’t perfect, but a cascade of calculation had been torrenting through my head as I’d tried to keep the helicopter aloft, and I could remember enough of the numbers to reconstruct how the building had imploded. The placement of the charges highlighted itself in my brain. The way the walls would have fallen in, the way the roof would have collapsed.

Where any air pockets might have formed.

I started digging.

I lost much of the next few minutes. My brain kept skipping. It couldn’t have been that long, as the sirens hadn’t arrived yet. Long enough for my hands to turn bloody, the skin and fingernails torn. Long enough for me to tear a muscle in my back.

Long enough for me to think it was hopeless. I still didn’t stop.

My senses screeched back into alignment when a muffled call strained through the rocks a few yards to the left of where I was digging. I tore toward it, forcing chunks of concrete out of my way with a single-minded mania. A long twist of rebar was in one hand; I couldn’t remember picking it up but I used it as a frenzied lever, heaving through debris that were larger than I was.

“Arthur? Arthur!” My voice was hoarse. How long had I been shouting?

“Russell?”

He’d taken shelter under…something…that was large and metal. I couldn’t tell what it had been from the corner I’d uncovered, but I didn’t care. I dug out the edge, down to the dark triangle underneath, and Arthur’s hand appeared, dust-covered and grasping. I grabbed on and pulled.

He grunted and coughed as he squeezed through, half-collapsing. I grabbed him around the middle and hauled, and we fell together on the rubble.

“Fuck you,” I croaked, when I could manage speech. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I was too angry. Or something. I wasn’t sure.

“Thanks,” Arthur said.

I was having trouble forming thoughts. “Fuck you,” I said again. “What—the—hell—?”

“They sent someone to destroy the evidence. ’Parently.” He sniffed and swiped a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt and blood. “Seems a bit extreme.”

I wanted to hit him, but that would require moving. “They offered you the opportunity to walk. I heard it.”

He looked away. “Had him at gunpoint. Wasn’t about to let our best lead walk out of there and blow the evidence.”

“And that plan worked so well for you.”

He flinched and said softly, “They got Sonya.”

I pushed myself up, stumbling, my boots sliding in the jagged depths of the rubble. “And you’re willing to blow yourself up for that? You’re willing to drag all the rest of us down with you? Me and Checker and Pilar, we’ll end up buried in buildings or buried by the DHS, and that’s just fine with you, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “I’m sorry, Russell. I should’ve gone to the authorities in the first place, this was too big—”

It was the worst possible thing he could’ve said. “Go to the cops, then,” I spat. “I hope you and Homeland Security are very happy together.”

I left Arthur sitting in the dark and struggled down off the heap of rubble. Fortunately, an impound lot gave me ample choice of a new vehicle.

I expected to hear sirens on my way out, but there was nothing. The processing center was on its own lot, out of line-of-sight of its nearest neighbors—maybe people had thought the implosion had been an earthquake.

The cops would get here eventually, though. Arthur could go to hell and join them.

Chapter 13

I called
Checker as I was jacking another car, once my hearing had mostly returned. “How’s the plan going?” I asked. We didn’t need the Feds. I’d show Arthur. I’d
show
him.

“In place—I think—”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because my worst nightmare has come to pass. The apocalypse. The end times—”

“Checker!”

“There are NSA agents in my house.”

Okay, for once I wasn’t going to accuse him of exaggeration. “Shit, what do they want? Do you need me to come over there and—”

“What? No! I mean, I don’t
think
so. I’m not under arrest or—or—whatever else they do to overzealous white hat dudes who are creative enough to step out of the narrowly confined boxes proscribed by our myopic legal system. They don’t even seem terribly interested in what I do, only what I know about Professor Sonya’s case, and trust me, I am not disabusing them of the notion that I am a small fry beneath their notice.” He paused unhappily, and the hyperbole went out of his voice. “I just…I just don’t like them in my house.”

I got that.

“What’s going on with Arthur?” Checker asked. “Is he okay? I didn’t want to call in case you—”

“He’s fine. He had a building fall on him.”

A full six seconds passed before Checker sputtered, “He
what?
Is he okay?”

“Are you having trouble hearing me? I said he’s fine.”

Checker didn’t answer.

“Don’t you dare feel bad for him. He did it to himself.”
He should’ve stuck with me.
“Besides, he got underneath something. He’s fine.”

“He got under…”

“Someone in this mess really likes playing with explosives. They almost blew me up, too.”

“They almost…” He trailed off. “I, uh, I gotta talk to Arthur.”

It wasn’t that I’d
expected
him to ask if I was okay, really. It was just—he usually would have. “Arthur’s running to the authorities,” I said bitterly. “The NSA, or Homeland Security, or whoever’s running this shit show. If you want in on that, knock yourself out.”

“I think it’s a joint operation,” he said distractedly. “The NSA doesn’t have field agents. I—uh—Cas—”

“Well, the DHS or whoever else, I’m going to beat them. Have you planted the evidence for the Lancer yet?”

“Yes—mostly. Listen, I—I don’t know how to—”

“I got out in time.”

“What? Oh, uh, yeah. Good. Cas, remember when I said that thing about personal worst nightmares and end times? I just—this is—”

I wasn’t interested. “Set it up so the Lancer thinks I’m taking a meeting and thinks he can track me down, somewhere with no bystanders to get in the way. Text me the location.”

“I—okay.”

He sounded so dispirited. I sighed. “We’ll kick this case in the balls and get the professor back. You’ll see.” Arthur would see.

“That’s not what I—okay. Okay. I’ll set it up.”

I hung up.

I dropped the phone on the passenger seat of the car I was jacking and leaned my head against the steering wheel, my hands in my lap. The bandage had come off my left one at some point. It didn’t look worse than the other, though; both hands were caked in blood and dirt.

I should drive to one of my bolt holes and patch myself up. And sleep. Sleep until Checker texted me with a location, one where, hopefully, the Lancer’s crew would swoop in to trap me and take me to Sonya Halliday.

It took me four tries to start the car. My grip was too clumsy on the wires.

♦ ♦ ♦

A tall
Asian man loomed above me. Rio.

“You have no choice,” he said. “Nor did he.”

“There’s always a choice,” someone answered. The words echoed through my chest and head as if I were the one who was saying them. “He chose to kill me rather than to let me die.”

Rio closed the distance between us with one step, suddenly menacing, and reached for me. His palm clamped over my nose and mouth—I wanted to struggle, to save myself, but if Rio wanted to kill me then I should die, right?

Right?

Animal panic took over and I fought, beating against the iron bar that was his arm, but I’d waited too long, and my movements were weak, feeble, the cells in my brain shutting down one by one, blinking out like the lights of a dying city—hypoxia and cell death—and from very far away I heard someone else say, “It’s the only option.”

I jerked awake. I was on a thin mattress in the shithole apartment I’d driven to, dirty and bloodied bandages scattered on the floor from redressing my accumulating injuries. My hand, back, and ribs had started to throb, but I could tell that wasn’t what had woken me.

Sleep had never been particularly restful for me, but in the last two years the nightmares had become worse and worse. More detailed and more crippling. When I wasn’t on the job, I couldn’t hope to stay asleep for more than half an hour before I woke, tangled and sweating and hyperventilating. Getting blackout drunk was the only thing that helped.

And now I was having trouble while working. Work had always focused me, kept me sane, but now…

I wasn’t stupid; I knew why it was happening. Two years ago was when we’d gone up against Pithica, when a psychic had rooted through my brain like it was her own personal rummage sale. I didn’t think she had taken any particular care not to break anything.

It was what it was. Just something I had to deal with now, I supposed.

I checked my phone, but I’d barely managed to stay sacked out for ninety minutes and Checker hadn’t texted yet. I thought about going to pick up some more armaments, but seeing as how I was trying my best to get captured, I probably didn’t even want to bring my Colt, since they’d just end up taking it.

I got up and did a more thorough job of cleaning and rewrapping my open wounds. None of them were very serious on their own, even the burn; it was the cumulative effect that was becoming troublesome. I bandaged both the hand and the graze on my shoulder, which I’d mostly forgotten about—it wasn’t that painful, and more importantly didn’t impede my movement. The bruised ribs and torn muscles were harder to ignore.

At least my head and lungs felt better than they had yesterday. That was good. Small favors. I chewed a few protein bars that tasted like sand and waited for Checker to get in touch.

He took a lot longer than I expected. It was five in the morning before he texted me an address with a nine o’clock meeting time and a short message:
CANT SAY 4SURE THEYLL SHOW.
He’d also included fake names for me and for my would-be business contact—Checker was nothing if not thorough. An instant later, I got another set of texts detailing anything the Lancer might know about me from the false trail—it wasn’t much; Checker had kept specifics to a minimum—and a final message that added,
MIGHT GO RADIO SILENT IF NSA ARND. ARTHUR TEAMING W/ THEM NOW.

Yeah. Of course he was. My mood soured, and I felt the sudden need to get out of my apartment, even though the setup was still four hours away.

The imaginary business meeting Checker had leaked turned out to be at an abandoned diner in the mountains. It wasn’t a spot I would’ve chosen—too many places to hide, too easy for someone to set up an ambush. Although I supposed them ambushing me was the whole point.

I turned sharply off a winding canyon road and down an overgrown driveway to reach the dilapidated had-been restaurant. The place looked like it had overreached in its day, with tiered landscaping inset into the slope and several separate buildings with outdoor stairs between them around defunct patios. Less of a diner and more of a kitschy yuppie eatery. No wonder it had gone out of business.

I climbed up to the main building. I didn’t even have to bust in; the door was unlocked. Inside, sunlight filtered through dusty windows to illuminate a long counter and bolted-down diner stools that had once been red. Presumably there had also once been tables, but they’d either been taken by the old owners or looted. I was betting on the latter, considering the odd bits of graffiti around and the used drug paraphernalia someone had left in plain sight on the countertop. I spotted a discarded condom in a corner as well. Lovely.

I sat on one of the grimy stools and leaned back against the counter, waiting.

The hours crawled by. I wondered if this was pointless. How did we even know the Lancer was still checking into Sonya Halliday, that he would see the clues Checker had left? What if Checker had been too subtle—or too obvious? What if the Lancer was good enough to figure out who I
actually
was, to see through Checker’s charade of an itinerant math genius collaborating with a university professor, and had ordered his men to put a bullet in me instead of bringing me in?

It had all seemed like such a good idea at the time.

I forced myself to calm the twitchiness, reminding myself that if this was to have any chance of working, I needed to look unsuspicious, to appear someone who could easily be captured. As nine o’clock rolled nearer, I forced myself to concentrate on the countertop instead of investigating every little noise outside. The faded pink laminate had an overlapping pattern of light white squiggles texturing it—I graphed the squiggles parametrically and then translated to rectangular coordinates just for kicks.

The swinging door to the kitchen banged open. Several large men with AKs crowded into the diner, apparently having come in through the back.

I had started to move before I tamped down the reflexes, and just ended up jerking off the stool. God bless Checker. It had worked. “Hi,” I said, absurdly. What did a person say when a bunch of guys with guns appeared and it
wasn’t
exactly what she’d been hoping would happen? “Who are you?”

“Come with us,” said one of the goons.

I wondered if I should put up an appearance of fear. Probably, though I wasn’t very good at such things. “Okay,” I said, trying to look subdued, and started forward.