Tether (22 page)

“Careful. You might want to remember that I outrank you by about ten levels. You don’t get to tell me what you expect.”

Adele straightened her shoulders. “You know I’m right.”

Thomas looked down at Adele, his expression a blank mask. “Was this the whole reason you came up here?”

“No,” Adele said. “Dryden sent me to find you. She says she needs to see you as soon as possible.”

Agent Dryden—Thomas couldn’t think of her by any other name—was waiting for him when he came downstairs. She put her finger to her lips, and her eyes darted toward the living room, where Sergei and Rocko were snoring in perfect harmony. Then she set off down the hallway, pausing at the end to beckon him to follow.

The door at the end of the corridor looked out of place with the rest of the building; it was metal, with an LCD screen embedded in the adjacent wall. “You have a situation room?” he asked. Dryden pressed her hand against the screen. It turned green, and the door slid open when she typed in the code.

They descended into the basement. Dryden yanked a string dangling from the ceiling, and the room lit up. It was an impressive situation room for a rural, off-the-grid farmhouse. There was one whole wall of screens, each tuned to one of the UCC’s six telebox stations, and another wall lined with metal filing cabinets. Dryden plucked two folding chairs from a rack near the staircase and handed one to Thomas.

“Sit,” she commanded.

“I assume this is about the information Dr. Moss sent me
for,” Thomas said. The physicist had been far from direct, but he’d been clear on one point: Dryden had a powerful piece of intelligence that, if released to the press and thus the nation, would bring about the ruination of the General’s career. That was why Thomas had come. If he was ever going to be with Sasha, on Earth or Aurora, he had to make the multiverse safe for her. And that meant unseating the General by whatever means necessary.

“To tell you the truth, I never believed anyone would come for it,” Dryden said, leaning forward on her elbows and looking him in the eye. “This isn’t some public relations nightmare we’re about to unleash here, Mayhew. This is a nuclear bomb; it will likely throw the country into absolute chaos, make the monarchy look weak, and open us up to further and escalated attacks from Libertas, which, as you know, has gained quite a bit of ground in the past few months.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Dryden sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Do you know why Moss’s code phrase was ‘I’ve seen the face of God’?”

“No,” Thomas said. “I didn’t think he believed in God.”

“He doesn’t.” Dryden laughed. “Believe me, he doesn’t. I left the KES ten years ago, under very bad circumstances. I protested the actions taken by my superiors regarding an operative who reported to me, and as a consequence I lost my job. Due to the sensitive nature of my mission, I was placed under surveillance, had my assets seized. Eventually I had to go into hiding, change my name and move to the back of beyond, and still, I feel the eyes of the KES on me everywhere I go. This isn’t a game, Thomas. Not to me, and not to Moss.”

“Not to me, either.” Nothing that put Sasha in danger was a game to him.

“The information I’m about to give you—Moss stole it and gave it to me for safekeeping. If the General knew I had it, Moss and I both would be dead. We worked on the many-worlds project for years; he’s the only person in the government I trust. When I asked him what he wanted me to do with this information, he told me to sit on it, to wait. We needed the perfect moment, when the General was weak and the country was ready.”

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with Dr. Moss’s views on religion,” Thomas said, “or lack thereof.”

“I was impatient,” Dryden said. “I was sure that at any moment the KES would find me and kill me and I’d never get the opportunity to see the General fall. I wanted to know how long it would take for us to get to that moment—days? weeks? a year? Moss laughed at me. He said the right time was as likely to come as he was to see the face of God.”

“So what’s changed?”

Dryden shrugged. “The General made a mistake. He thought going to war with Farnham would strengthen his position, but he was wrong. The nation was enthralled with the princess’s wedding; public opinion of the royal family was at an all-time high. Nobody can resist a young, good-looking couple in love.”

“They weren’t in love,” Thomas pointed out. “They hadn’t even met.”

“The Castle media department was doing an excellent job of spinning that into a fairy tale,” Dryden said. “Say what you will about those people, but they’re very good at what they do.”

“So what is this explosive information?” Dr. Moss was a strange character, slightly crazy, entirely paranoid. Thomas was starting to wonder if Agent Dryden was the same. What
if there
was
no intel? What if he was putting Sasha’s life at risk—not to mention his own or those of the junior agents who had followed him down into this foxhole—for nothing but the mutual delusion of two desperate people?

Dryden rose from her chair. She walked over to the wall of screens and pressed the power button on the only one that wasn’t showing some kind of news report. Instead of turning on, the screen swung forward on a hinge, revealing a safe. Dryden opened the safe and drew out a thin file folder. “Do you know what a kill list is?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. A list of people to kill.”

“Ten points, toy soldier,” Dryden said. Thomas cringed. He hadn’t been a toy soldier in years, and he’d sailed through the Academy so quickly he almost hadn’t been one at all. “The thing about kill lists is that they’re illegal. The government cannot simply execute its citizens in secret.”

“For some reason, I don’t find that comforting.” He remembered the General’s threat to send an exterminator after Sasha. There were things that went on in the KES that even a shadow agent like him could never guess at, each one more horrifying than the last.

“You shouldn’t. The General is smart about how he uses the kill list. He doesn’t just go around taking out people who disagree with him or cause temporary trouble. But he does do it, and the most recent name on this list is …” Dryden shook her head. “I didn’t even believe it at first, that’s how shocking it is.”

“You keep the kill list in a file folder? Shouldn’t it be on some secure server somewhere?”

“Oh, why didn’t I think of that? A server.” Dryden frowned. “Because servers get hacked, even secure ones. The General doesn’t keep the kill list on a
server.
The orders exist only in
hard copy, on lightning paper, so they’re incredibly easy to get rid of. You touch a flame to these things, and they’ll go up in two seconds. Drop them in water and they dissolve instantaneously. Only two copies of each kill order are created: one that goes to the mission agent tasked with carrying out the assassination—which is destroyed as soon as it’s read—and one that goes in the KES shadow archives in Subbasement H of the Tower. That’s where these came from.”

Dryden handed Thomas the folder. “The most recent kill order, the one you want, is on top. But you might want to flip through them. There’s another one, from about a decade ago, that I think you should probably see.”

Thomas opened the folder and forced himself to look at the top sheet. His eyes widened as he ran down the mission data sheet. “This can’t be right.”

“It’s right,” Dryden said. “It’s real, it happened, and the General ordered it. Now do you see why we had to handle this thing like plutonium?”

“I don’t understand,” Thomas said. “Why would the General order this? How does this make his position stronger?”

“The General has been siphoning power from the king for almost his entire career. The arranged marriage between Juliana and the prince of Farnham was the General’s idea. The king resisted at first, but eventually the General won. He always won with the king, in the end. I assume that once the treaty was signed and the marriage agreed upon, the king had finally outlived his usefulness.”

“So what you’re telling me—”

“I’m not telling you. That paper is,” Dryden pointed out.

“The General had the king assassinated,” Thomas finished. “That’s what I’m supposed to believe?”

“Well, not exactly,” Dryden said. “He didn’t actually die, if you recall.”

“Not yet. But it seems like he’s getting there.”

“If the General stays in power, this war with Farnham is only the beginning,” Dryden said. “Are you sure you can do this? He is your father, after all.”

“My father’s name was Harper Lebec. He died on a military base almost fifteen years ago,” Thomas said, staring at the king’s kill order. “The General is just the man who raised me.”

“Like that’s such a small thing. And anyway, you say that now, but plotting against the king is high treason, and I’m sure you know what the penalty for that crime is in this country.”

Death. The penalty for high treason in the UCC was death. Thomas understood, finally, Dryden’s concerns. By turning the kill order over to the press, he was guaranteeing his father’s execution, and she didn’t think he was strong enough to do it.

Dryden tried to take the folder from him, but Thomas held on tight. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “We can find someone else. I would understand.”

But Thomas was barely listening. He had started to flip through the other kill orders, traveling years into the KES’s secret, dirty past searching for what Dryden had told him to look for. He knew it as soon as he saw it. The very first field on the kill order form after the date was
NAME—LAST, FIRST
, and the last sheet from the bottom had
ANDERSON, GEORGE
typed across the top.

The General had ordered the murder of Sasha’s father.

I couldn’t sleep all night. When the first rays of sunlight pierced the curtains, I got out of bed, careful not to make any noise. I dressed and went downstairs to see if anyone else was awake. I found Agent Dryden in the kitchen making coffee and accepted a steaming cup.

“Nobody’s up yet,” she said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Okay.” I blew on my coffee, trying to work up the courage to ask the question that kept pinging around in my head. “Agent Dryden?”

“You can just call me Dryden,” she said with a smile. “It’s what my friends used to call me, back when my name wasn’t officially Constance. Back when I had friends. It’s hard to be social when you’re in hiding.”

“Dryden.” I took a deep breath. “Thomas told me you worked on the many-worlds project back when you were in the KES.”

“That’s true.” She looked as if she knew exactly what I was about to ask.

“My father’s name was George Anderson,” I told her. “Did you know him?”

“I did,” she said. “George worked for me. I was the one who sent him to Earth in the first place. I was very disappointed when he chose to stay.”

“I’m not,” I said. “If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Fair enough. What is it you really want to ask, Sasha?”

“What was my dad like?” I asked. “He and my mom died when I was seven, so I never really knew them. I hardly remember anything about them. I’d like to know if he was a good man.”

“You have to understand—Anderson reported to me, but we weren’t close in any sense of the word. I was his KES handler, but he wasn’t an agent. He was a scientist. We didn’t have all that much in common.”

“But you talked to him,” I pressed. “You knew him. You must have had some kind of opinion.”

“Your father always struck me as a man of principle. It wasn’t my decision to put him on the front lines of Operation Looking Glass; I thought it was an odd choice. He never seemed comfortable with the assignment, and it didn’t surprise me when he defected. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me more about what he was like as a person.”

“Does it matter? He was your father. Surely you would love him no matter what.”

“Yeah. I just … I have a hard time picturing my parents. They’re these very rough sketches, and I’m trying to fill in some of the details.”

“Well, let’s see what I can remember. He was very funny, your dad. Our meetings were businesslike and serious, because of the matters we were discussing, but he always found an opportunity to make me laugh. He liked classical music quite a bit, but he couldn’t play any instruments, because he
was tone deaf. He had a sister, I believe. He talked about her sometimes, how jealous she would’ve been if she knew he was living in another universe. He liked to say she was the adventurous one in the family.”