Two minutes out from New Sunan airport, the tapering spires of Pyongyang
looming out of the dull grey smog ahead, and a cascade of CI routines are
already blossoming neon orange in my peripheral vision against the scattering
of tripwire probes that invisibly assail me. Nothing too serious; low-tech
commercial grade and homebrew code that is used to dealing with far easier
prey, tourists and businessmen who’d be none the wiser to the data they’d lost
or the secrets they’d shared. I was packing a near-as military spec e-iris and
docking system; enough to foil all but the most major of major players.
I settle back into the comfort of my seat and gaze out of the window at
the passing landscape, little more than a concrete blur as the Maglev continues
its relentless acceleration. I set fragments of scraped data, that my slave
routines had worked up for me in-flight, drifting before me like snowflakes and
allow myself to be lost in the hypnotic allure of aggregated data feeds. Ballistics
data from an on-going case in Seattle, a set of invoices relating to a case in San
Diego, reminders on rent for my office, an invite to a party (declined), the
result of a blood test I’d taken after having been bitten (negative for pathogens)
and a bevy of voicemails from people I either didn’t know or didn’t want to
reply to.
The trail had not been an easy one to follow. Riddles wrapped within
riddles and a rising body count that was scattered across at least three
continents. Shell companies, convenient suicides, accidents, data loss; whoever
was behind this had worked hard to make sure that it would be nearly impossible
to untangle the web of deceit. Nearly impossible.
I could pinpoint the exact moment that this had stopped being just a
case and had become something more to me, something personal. An empty New York
parking lot, rain streaming down and pooling at my feet; a witness already dead
and a shot that I’d felt before I’d heard; the pink scar tissue that runs
across the breadth of my back a testament to the most fractional of misses.
They had, I liked to believe, made a mistake that day. As I had lain face down
on the black asphalt, cheek mushed up against the grit and gravel, cold rain
soaking and mingling with the pulsing warmth that I knew was my own blood, I
had changed. In that moment, I had gone from being merely interested to being fully
invested.
A woman dressed in a black business suit threads her way down the aisle
of the train, a Louis Vuitton suitcase trailing in her wake, and sits down opposite
to me. Porcelain skin and obsidian eyes that look me over with practised
disinterest, black hair knitted into thick dreadlocks that are coiled around
her head like a serpent’s basket. She stares
absently out of the window for a few moments before turning her attention back
to me, her red lips pursed as if waiting for me to ask her a question. I decide
not to disappoint.
“Can I help you?”
She stares back at me in silence for a moment, her face a blank canvas
that betrays nothing. Finally she smiles, a thin smile that seems almost etched
into place.
“I don’t know, Mr Melville. Is there?”
Her voice is soft, almost melodic, and I feel a rumble of discontent roll through my stomach. She knows my
name. Not one of the names that I have been travelling under, not the false
passport upon which I arrived into this country less than two hours earlier.
She knows my real name.
“You seem to have me at a disadvantage, Miss…?”
She gives me that smile again but her eyes stay utterly cold. “My name
is of little importance. I come with an offer from my employer for you.”
“And who might your employer be?”
She ignores the question and instead slips the suitcase onto her knee
and opens it to reveal a yellow stack of US government bonds.
“There’s $20 million here.” she says, and pushes it towards me.
“And I’m supposed to just take this and go home, I assume?”
“That’s exactly what you do, Mr Melville. You take this suitcase and
you go home and you never go poking your noise into the business of my employer
again.”
I nod thoughtfully.
“And if I don’t take this briefcase?” I ask, “If I tell your employer
that I can’t be bought? If I carry on coming and I don’t stop?”
“Then you force our hand and leave us with no choice but to make you go away.”
I laugh.
“And what are you going to do? Kill me?”
“I came prepared for all possible contingencies today.”
“I backed up immediately before this trip,” I reply, “I’ll be reskinned
in three days. Kill me and I’ll be back here in a week, tops.”
She closes the suitcase in silence and places it on the floor of the train
before standing up and slipping off her jacket to reveal a suicide vest that glistens
beneath the train’s fluorescent lights. A metal belt knotted with strands of
blue wiring that serve to stitch together several pale white blocks of C4. I don’t
know a whole lot about plastic explosives, but I’m pretty certain that she is
carrying enough to take out the entire carriage. She holds a wireless detonator
loosely in her right hand, her thumb hovering against the button.
“Last chance to change your mind, Mr Melville.”
These are the moments upon which you are judged, I guess. The times where
pressure acts to reveal our true character, lay bare our beliefs and motives.
“Death doesn’t scare me.” I say, and I realise I truly believe it in that moment. I’ve never
been reskinned before but I know it’s tried and trusted tech, as proven as the
train we were riding on today. “At best, you’re just delaying me.”
“Am I?”
Her eyes glitter black, her smile a line drawn across her face that serves
to eat away at any beauty it might otherwise hold.
“And what if, Mr Melville, there is no reskinning for you? What if this
is all there is?”
She leans in close, the detonator now tight in hand, and I can smell
the faint delicate tang of her perfume.
“I told you I came prepared for all contingencies, Mr Melville.”
Even as I try to process what she just said, her thumb closes hard on
the button and I wonder whether her white face will be the last thing I ever…
