The Silent Army (35 page)

“That’s it,” I whispered. It was just a drawing, but the face was the same as Nico’s had been in the vision; head collapsed like a rotten fruit, on the end of a bent-stick neck. The whites of the eyes were dotted with black spots, and the lips were peeled back over long, crowded teeth. He was dressed in some kind of military uniform, with a name patch on it that read VAGOTT.

“I guess it was a bad dream,” Penny said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to me.

“What does it mean?”

“No one knows,” she said. “Almost no one’s ever seen it. That’s the best lead we’ve had, and it’s not much.”

“Lead for what?”

“Stuff that happens in the void happens after what Ai calls the Event,” she said, pointing. “It’s empty because no one ever reports seeing anything from that point on.”

“Because they’re dead,” I said.

“Worse than that,” she said. “Nothing phases past that point, which means, if Ai is right, that of all the possible outcomes, almost nothing ever gets through. That’s a pretty big hole.”

“So it’s the end of everything? Forever?”

Penny shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “But for us, and everyone walking parallel . . . maybe we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.”

I stared back at the screen. The dots stood out, very close to where the entries for the green room were stored. So far, nothing on the other side of the rim looked worth surviving for, but if I’d seen it . . .

“I thought we stopped it,” I said. Penny squeezed my shoulder.

“Hey, the nukes didn’t go off,” she said. “That seems to trigger the rest, so who knows? Things don’t change overnight. Give it time.”

I nodded, but a bad feeling had wormed its way inside of me, and I couldn’t shake it. Even when I drank most of the rest of the bottle, it didn’t budge. I recognized the uniform Vagott was wearing; I’d seen it before in one of my visions. I’d seen it the last time I was in the green room.

A group of uniformed men came down the hall toward the door, shoving a man in handcuffs ahead of them. Behind them I’d seen a woman, partly in shadow . . . a small, skinny woman with her hair in a bun, and a beaklike nose. I never got a good look at her face, but it was me.

I was sure it was me.

Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office

Four hours after the
Senopati Nusantara
was destroyed, and two hours after I left Calliope in the hospital, I sat behind a locked door in the Federal Building. Alice Hsieh stood against the wall next to me, her arms crossed in front of her as we watched a display monitor mounted on the wall. In the corner of the ceiling to the left of it, the interrogation room’s camera hung from its wire, unplugged.

On the screen, a recording of one of the many JZI feeds taken from the MSST helicopter showed a clear shot of me standing on the deck while Faye ran through the rain toward me. I watched as Faye grabbed my jacket then tiptoed up to kiss me on the mouth. With the revivor’s black lips pressed against mine, Alice froze the frame.

“You want to explain that?” she asked.

“Believe me, I wish I could.”

I’d thought a lot about that incident since we’d lifted off and the boat sank below us. If I was dosed with truth serum, which could happen before the debriefing was over, I might admit that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Faye’s lips were smooth and dry. When she flicked her tongue between my teeth for that one second, it felt cool against mine. The body armor saved me from the shots she’d fired, but I still wasn’t sure if she’d intended to kill me or not. When she’d said ‘this is for the best,’ did she mean my death, or Fawkes’s escape?

“That revivor has been identified as Faye Dasalia. Do you know that name?”

“You know I do.”

“Then you also remember going through illegal channels to have her body delivered to a secret location inside the city where you personally revived her.”

I nodded.

“You stated at that time that this revivor was destroyed in the factory fire.”

“I said it was most likely destroyed in the fire.”

“When, in fact, you knew damn well it had not been.”

“I didn’t know that.” If she decided to take the gloves off, it would come out that I’d tried to find her since she’d disappeared. That wouldn’t look good.

Alice took a seat next to me and leaned close. She stared into my eyes, and I watched that dark blind spot drift across her face.

“Don’t wait for me to try it,” she said in a low voice. “I know it won’t work.”

“Cards right on the table, huh?”

“Look,” she said. “Sean is dead. I know you’d learned his little secret, and I know that, in spite of that, you still trusted him, and even liked him. I’m taking over his responsibilities, and you’re going to be working with me now. How that goes is going to be partly up to you.”

“Sean had my back. He wasn’t my shadow.”

“He watched out for you,” she said. “That’s all he ever tried to do. I can do the same thing.”

“I don’t need a chaperone.” She smiled.

“Think of me as your wingman,” she said. “The partner you’re inevitably going to get assigned? Think of him as your shadow.”

“I won’t partner with someone I know is reporting on me.”

“Then you’re free to quit,” she said. “Leave the bureau. But I’ll promise you this—certain people think you’re significant, and we’ll be keeping an eye on you, if we have to lock you away somewhere to do it.”

I stared at the screen and the image of Faye with her lips on mine. Alice was serious. I had no doubts about that.

“This is bigger than you,” she continued. “You can’t hide from us. We already know what you eat for breakfast, so it’s a safe bet we know about your old girlfriend, and that secret deal Fawkes tried to make with you.”

“I never considered that offer.”

“The way I see it, you’ve got three options: you can trust that we know what we’re doing and that stopping Fawkes is the right thing, you can trust that Fawkes is right and team up with him, or you can try to just check out—leave the bureau and walk away. Only one of those options is going to result in you walking around a free man.”

She wasn’t bluffing. If she wanted to, she could have me detained and held indefinitely. But I didn’t think that was her plan.

“What’s it going to be?” she asked. “You know how Fawkes wanted this to play out. If you won’t trust us, can we at least agree that his way can’t happen?”

“We can agree on that, yes.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

“We didn’t stop him,” I said.

“I know.”

“The rest of the nukes and his army might have been destroyed along with that ship, but he still has one card left to play.”

“Project Huma,” she said. “I know.”

When I’d used the device MacReady had Bhadra smuggle to me, I’d picked up hundreds of nodes. They hadn’t been activated yet, but for them to be useful to Fawkes, he must have some way to kill them and bring them back quickly.

“The attack on Concrete Falls was two months ago, and already he’s injected close to six hundred people,” I said. “If it works the way it’s supposed to, that’s six hundred revivors he could have inside the city, under his command, at any time.”

She nodded.

“He won’t use Second Chance as a front again, but he’ll set up his operation somewhere else,” I said. “Every day that goes by, he’ll add more to his ranks.”

“You’re with us, then?”

“Yes.”

She tossed the remote down on the table between us, then sat on the edge. She looked down at me.

“This footage is going to go away,” she said. “It’s going away, because if it doesn’t, you could have fresh charges brought against you and be placed under an internal investigation. We need you free to act.”

She looked a little bit relieved. They needed me, or thought they did. I saw it on Ai’s face in the restaurant when she tried to control me and couldn’t. Even before she told me she’d seen me kill Fawkes, there was something in her eye. I didn’t get what it was at the time, but now I thought maybe it was hope.

You kill Fawkes.

“I’m an agent of the FBI,” I said. “I work for them, not her.”

“Agreed,” she said, “but we’re pulling out the stops on this one. You’ll get everything you need to help track them, and Fawkes, down. We have a long reach, Agent, and we plan to use it. That means control of the city, including local law enforcement and the media. We’ll bring on Stillwell Corps to help cover the ground we need to cover.”

She was expecting an argument, but she didn’t get one. The truth was that even with those steps, finding the people who’d been injected was going to be difficult at best. They were third-tier citizens, and most of them were homeless, transient, or undocumented. Even for those who had a valid identification or address, the clinics that processed them had been destroyed along with their records. They were scattered over a huge area, and six hundred, even six thousand, was a drop in a very big bucket.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “You find the carriers, and I’ll track down Fawkes. This won’t end until he’s stopped.”

Alice nodded. I stood up, and she stood to face me. She held out her hand, and there was a look in her eye, a blind certainty that bothered me. Fanaticism was dangerous. With Fawkes creating new soldiers at a rate of six hundred a month, though, things could get out of hand quickly. There were literally millions of third-tier citizens scattered throughout the city. If he was allowed the resources and the time to make all of those millions rise, there would be no way for anyone to stop them.

I shook her hand, and she smiled faintly.

“You’re doing the right thing,” she said, and all I could think of was the way Motoko had looked at me from across the table the night we met. I remembered how sure she was when she said I would join them, like it was beyond anyone’s control.

Even mine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Knapp
grew up in New England and currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Kim. He is at work on the next revivors novel. Visit him at
www.zombie0.com
.

AVAILABLE NOW FROM

JAMES KNAPP

STATE OF DECAY

They’re called revivors—technologically reanimated corpses—and away from the public eye they do humanity’s dirtiest work. But FBI agent Nico Wachalowski has stumbled upon a conspiracy involving revivors being custom made to kill—and a startling truth about the existence of these undead slaves.

“Knapp’s writing is sharp and his fast and furious plot twists keep the pages turning.”
—
Publishers Weekly

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