Lock In

  “I came home for dinner with you two,” I said. “We heard noises. I insisted on taking point because I’m the FBI agent.”

  Dad looked dubious. “Come on, Dad,” I said. “You’re one of the most famous men on the damn planet. I think you can sell that story.”

  “Why do you need us to tell this story?” Mom asked.

  I looked over at the dead man in the room. “Because I need the person who did this to believe I don’t know what he’s up to.”

  “Chris,” Mom said. “The man who did this is dead.”

  “That’s exactly what I want him to think,” I said.

  Mom looked at me like I was nuts.

  My field of vision lit up with something other than a maintenance alert. It was Klah Redhouse. I told my parents to hold on and I took the phone call.

  “You okay?” Klah asked. My punchiness was apparently evident by voice alone.

  “Ask me that tomorrow,” I said.

  “I did what you asked and looked through the Nation’s medical records,” Redhouse said. “I got clearance from President Becenti.”

  “What did you find?”

  “There were two people who matched what you were looking for,” Redhouse said. “One of them was a woman, Annie Brigmann. She died three years ago. The man she was driving with fell asleep with her in the car and drove off the road. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The car rolled over her.”

  “The other one?”

  “His name is Bruce Skow,” Redhouse said. “I tried to look him up. He went missing from his home about three months ago.”

  “Hold on a second,” I said. I looked over to my assassin, took a picture of his face, and sent it off to Redhouse. “Tell me if that’s him,” I said.

  “That looks like him,” Redhouse said. “You know him?”

  “He’s in my parents’ house right now,” I said. “Dead.”

  “That can’t be coincidence,” Redhouse said.

  “No,” I said. “No, it can’t.”

  “What do you want me to do with this?” Redhouse asked.

  “I need you to wait for me,” I said. “It won’t be long. I just need a little time.”

  “You have earned credit,” Redhouse said. “You’ve got time.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and disconnected. I could hear the sirens coming up the driveway.

  Chapter Nineteen

  AN HOUR WITH the Loudoun County sheriffs, who seemed delighted to buy into the “home robbery gone wrong” story. I left just as the media, and Dad’s media people, started to arrive. That was something they could handle. At some point I would need the FBI to take possession of Skow’s body, because I needed to confirm what was in his head. I would worry about that later.

  My threep in D.C. was where I had left it, and had a police guard, although whether it was a guard or a cop waiting to arrest me wasn’t clear for the first couple of minutes. A diagnostic showed that the damage to the threep from the bullet into the back was worse than I originally thought, and I had a couple of hours before it locked up entirely. I reflected on the fact that in a single day I had managed to seriously damage three separate threeps.

  An hour arguing with Trinh and the Metro police about having Rees’s body released to the FBI. The point that Rees had just attempted to assassinate an FBI agent did not seem to convince Trinh all that much. Finally had to resort to having people over my head at the Bureau go over her head in the Metro police. By the time I was done Trinh no longer wanted to be my friend, ever. Suited me.

  Another hour with the FBI recounting the Rees attack, making up a suitable lie about leaving the scene to check in on my parents and otherwise catching up my place of employment with the day’s events. I focused on the Rees attack, rather than the whole day. Did not volunteer to speculate on causes, and no one asked me to. For now Rees’s attack was being treated like a single event, unrelated to anything else me and Vann were doing. This also suited me.

  Finished up just as my threep ground to a halt. Managed to get to my desk. I would have to schedule for the local Sebring-Warner dealership to pick it up for repair tomorrow. In the meantime I checked the inventory for visitor threeps I could use.

  There were none. We had called in reinforcements for the march. Visiting agents were borrowing the five threeps we had on hand. Fine, I thought, and started looking for rentals.

  There were none. The march meant that every rental threep in the District, Maryland, and Northern Virginia was rented through Monday. The closest rental threep available was in Richmond. It was a Metro Junior Courier.

  “The hell with this,” I said, and finally exercised my rich-person privileges. I called up my Sebring-Warner salesman on his personal number and told him that if he could get to his store and have a threep ready for me in forty-five minutes, I would pay full price plus an extra five thousand as a tip for dragging him out of whatever Adams-Morgan singles pit he was currently casting about in.

  An hour later I walked out of the D.C. Sebring-Warner dealership in a 325K—a few steps down from the 660XS but at this point it seemed likely I would have it for about a day before I completely trashed it in the line of duty—and took a cab to Georgetown Hospital, calling Vann to let her know I was on my way, and in a new threep.

  I found her in the emergency room, arm in a sling, arguing with an orderly.

  “We need to have you in the wheelchair until you exit the building,” he said.

  “I was shot in the shoulder, not the legs,” she said.

  “It’s hospital policy.”

  “I can’t move this arm, but the rest of me works fine, so if you want to try to stop me, see where it gets you. The good news is, you’re already at the hospital.” She walked off, leaving the annoyed orderly behind.

  “Vann,” I said.

  She looked over at me, taking in the new threep. “Shane?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Prove it.”

  “I royally pissed off Trinh tonight,” I said. “I think she hates me more than she hates you.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Vann said. “But if you got her even halfway there I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “Good,” Vann said. “Then you buy me a drink. Come on. I know a bar.”

  “I don’t really think you should be hitting the bars tonight,” I said. “You have a hole in your shoulder.”

  “It’s a scratch,” Vann said.

  “A hole in your shoulder from a bullet,” I said.

  “It was a small bullet,” Vann said.

  “Fired by someone trying to kill you.”

  “All the more reason I need a drink.”

  “No bars,” I said.

  Vann looked at me sourly.

  “Let’s go back to my place,” I said.

  “Why would I want to do that,” Vann said.

  “Because we have to catch up,” I said. “And because there are agents there watching over the place, so you won’t be killed in the night. I have a couch you can sleep on.”

  Vann continued to look unconvinced.

  “And we’ll stop on the way to get a bottle of something,” I said.

  “Better,” she said.

  * * *

  I entered my town house with my public ID up so that my housemates wouldn’t panic when they saw me. Tayla came over and stopped when she looked at Vann.

  “They let you out,” she said.

  “It’s more like I didn’t let them keep me in,” Vann said.

  Even without facial expression I could sense disapproval radiating from Tayla, but then she let it go. “You two need to access the news,” she said.

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said.

  “They have a video message from Brenda Rees,” she said. “It went live on the net just before she shot at Agent Vann.” She pointed to the living room. “We have a monitor there for guests.”

  “I have my glasses,” Vann said, but we went into the living room anyway, fired up the
monitor to the news channel, which had a copy of Rees’s video. In the video she talked about the injustice of Abrams-Kettering, how it was causing suffering among so many of her clients, and how everyone was to blame. “There are no innocents among the non-Hadens,” she said. “They allowed this to happen. Cassandra Bell said it, and I believe it: This is a war on a disabled minority. Well, I am now a soldier in this war. And for me the battle starts tonight.”

  “Do you believe this?” Vann asked me, as we watched the video again.

  “Hell, no,” I said.

  “You caught the reference to Cassandra Bell.”

  “I did. Another act of violence, ostensibly perpetrated at her behest.”

  “Anyone killed tonight?” Vann asked.

  “Aside from Rees?” I asked. Vann nodded. “No. There were some people who were stampeded and other injuries, and property damage from the grenade. But the only person she shot at was you.”

  “And you,” Vann said.

  “I got hit,” I said. “But that was because I was protecting you.”

  “And that would go against her story anyway,” Vann said. “So you and I know she was gunning for me but her story will muddy up the waters. When the morning shows go live tomorrow, they’re going to tie this into the Loudoun Pharma attack.”

  “That sounds about right to me,” I said.

  Vann didn’t say anything to this, but touched the monitor to bring up the latest news. The top story aside from Rees’s attack was the shooting at my parents’ house. Vann pulled up the story and watched it.

  “A burglar,” Vann said, after the report ended.

  “That’s what I told my parents to say.”

  “Think it will float?”

  “There’s no reason for it not to,” I said.

  “How are your parents?” Vann asked.

  “Now that they’ve got their people and responses in place they’ll be fine,” I said. “Dad’s in shock a little. Killing a man ends any thought of him running for Senate.”

  “A man defending his home doesn’t play so poorly in most parts of Virginia,” Vann said.

  “No, but it’s balanced out by the image of a really big angry black man with a shotgun,” I said. “Even Mom’s ancestors being gun runners for the Confederacy isn’t going to make up for that. So I’m pretty sure a party rep is going to come around tomorrow and tell him they would be delighted for him to endorse the candidacy of someone else.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Eventually. Dad’s probably got a week of think pieces and commentary about him and the shooting to get through before he can do anything else. A normal person would be able to get through it in private. Dad has to worry about what it means for his legacy.”

  “And the ‘burglar,’” Vann said.

  “A Navajo named Bruce Skow,” I said.

  “And he’s like Johnny Sani.”

  “As far as we can tell so far, probably,” I said. “We’ll need to get into his head to confirm.”

  “Another remote-controlled Integrator,” Vann said.

  “Looks like,” I said.

  Vann sighed and then pointed at the liquor store bag I still held in my hand, containing a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a package of Solo cups. “Pour me some of that,” she said. “Make it a tall one.”

  “How tall?” I asked.

  “Don’t get me drunk,” Vann said. “But just short of that would be fine.”

  I nodded. “Why don’t you head up to my room,” I said. “I’ll bring it up to you in a minute.” I pointed in the right direction and then went into the kitchen, which was a characteristically bare Haden kitchen, save for the pallets of nutritional liquid.

  Tayla, whose room was on the first floor, saw me go in and followed. “You’re getting her a drink,” she said.

  “The alternative to getting her one here was getting her one at a bar,” I said. “At least here I can cut her off if she gets sloppy.”

  “What she really needs at this point is some sleep, not bourbon,” she said, pointing to the bottle.

  “I’m not going to disagree with you on that,” I said, opening the bottle. “But she’s not going to do that at the moment. In which case I might as well make her comfortable because we need to do some work.”

  “And how are you doing?” Tayla asked.

  “Well, you know,” I said, opening the Solo cup package. “Today I fought with a ninja threep, saw two women view the last video from a dead relative, had a woman explode twenty feet from me, and watched my dad kill an intruder with a shotgun.” I took a cup and poured the bourbon into it. “If I had any sense I’d take this bottle and attach it to my intake tube.”

  “I’ve seen people do that, actually,” Tayla said.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “How does it work for them?”

  “About as well as you’d expect,” Tayla said. “Haden bodies are sedentary and in general have low alcohol tolerances to start. Our digestive systems are used to taking in nutritional liquids, not actual food and drink. And then there’s the fact that the disease changes our brain structure, which for a lot of Hadens increases the propensity for addiction.”

  “So they’re all fucked up, is what you’re saying.”

  “What I’m saying is there’s nothing as fucked up as a Haden alcoholic.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

  “You need sleep too,” Tayla said. “Professional opinion.”

  “I’m not going to disagree with you on that, either,” I said. “But for all the reasons I’ve just outlined, I’m a little wired right now.”

  “Is it always like this?” Tayla asked.

  “My job?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is my first week on the job,” I said. “So, so far? Yes.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Like I wish I had decided to be the typical rich kid and been a sponge on my parents,” I said.

  “You don’t really mean that,” Tayla said.

  “No,” I said. “But at the moment I really want to feel like I did.”

  Tayla came over and rested a hand on my arm. “I’m the house doctor,” she said. “If you need help you know where I am.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep tonight.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Okay.” She turned to go.

  “Tayla,” I said. “Thanks for tonight. It means a lot to me that you helped my partner.”

  “That’s my job,” Tayla said. “I mean, you saw me help a man who two minutes earlier was planning to bash my head in with a bat. I wouldn’t do any less for someone you care about.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “YOU TOOK YOUR time,” Vann said, as I walked into the room.

  “Tayla wanted to talk,” I said, walking the bourbon over to her. “She’s worried about the both of us.”

  “Seems fair,” Vann said, taking the cup. “Both of us survived an assassination attempt tonight. I’m worried about the both of us too.” She took a sip from the cup. “Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

  “I thought we were saving story time until after the march,” I said.

  “We were,” Vann said. “But then your friend Tony showed up with his discovery, and then someone tried to put a bullet into my head. So I’ve decided that sooner is better than later for story time.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “This is going to wander a bit,” Vann warned.

  “I’m all right with that,” I said.

  “I’m forty,” Vann said. “I was sixteen when I got sick. This was during the first wave of infections, when they were still figuring out what the hell to do about it. I lived in Silver Spring and there was a party I wanted to go to with friends in Rockville, but Rockville was quarantined because there was a Haden’s outbreak. I didn’t care, because I was sixteen and stupid.”

  “Like any sixteen-year-old,” I said
.

  “Exactly. So me and my friends got into a car, found a way in that didn’t have a roadblock on it, and went to the party. No one at the party looked sick to me when we got there, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I finally got back home around three and my dad was waiting for me. He thought I was drunk and asked me to breathe so he could smell my breath. I coughed on him like an asshole and then I went to bed.”

  Vann paused to take another sip out of her cup. I waited for what I knew was coming next.

  “Three days later I felt like my entire body had swelled. I had a temperature, I was raspy, my head hurt. Dad was feeling the same way. My mother and my sister felt fine, so my dad told them to go over to her sister’s so she wouldn’t get sick.”

  “Not a good idea,” I said. They had probably been infected but weren’t showing symptoms yet. That’s how Haden’s spread as far as it did.

  “No,” Vann agreed. “But this was early days so they were still trying to figure these things out. They left and Dad and I watched TV and drank coffee and waited to feel better. After a couple of days we both thought the worst was over.”

  “And then the meningitis hit,” I said.

  “And then the meningitis hit. I thought my head was going to explode. My father called 911 and told them what was going on. They came to our house in hazmat suits, grabbed us, and sent us over to Walter Reed, which is where second-stage Haden’s victims were sent. I was there for two weeks. I almost died right at the beginning. They pumped some experimental serum in me that gave me a seizure. I tensed up so hard I ended up breaking my jaw.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What happened to your father?”

  “He didn’t get any better,” Vann said. “The meningitis stage fried up his brain. He went into a coma a couple of days after we got to Walter Reed and died a month later. I was there when we unplugged him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Vann said. She took another sip. “What really sucks is that my dad was one of those people who made a big fuss out of wanting to donate his organs when he died. But when he died, we weren’t allowed to donate any of his organs. They didn’t want someone to get his kidneys and the Haden virus too. We asked Walter Reed if they wanted to use his body for research, and they told us that they already had more bodies for that than they could use. So we ended up cremating him. All of him. He would have hated that.”