Autonomous by Chris Howard, chapters 43 – 44
UPS delivered a big box to Umiko and Nathan’s Cambridge condo seven days after the death of Captain Reyes of the Katren.
Nathan got up early, made coffee, and was sitting at the dinette table, waiting for a call that would never come. Tom will never call again.
He stared at the loops of blue-purple blooms on the aconitum plant on the window sill above the kitchen sink.
His coffee went cold.
Umiko was already up at Tom’s place, organizing his possessions, closing accounts, transferring ownership of records, going through boxes of books and papers that had been stored in his garage for decades, and through it all still found time to track down and deliver the news to Tom’s old colleagues and acquaintances. His funeral was tomorrow.
Nathan didn’t hear the door buzz, not until the second, more insistent, call. It was the lobby ringer, a delivery for “Nathan Isenart.”
He took the stairs, three flights in silence, a stealthy approach to the first floor, ready to kill someone.
But it really was the UPS carrier, a fit woman in her twenties, brown shorts and shirt, dark hair in a ponytail, geared up with the standard tracking and radio equipment. She looked up as he approached, “Nathan Isenart?”
“That’s me.”
“Sign here.” She handed over the ruggedized tablet and stylus, nodding to the good-sized brown box leaning against the wall as he handed it all back to her.
“You dive?”
He looked at her a moment, tensing up. A glance down at the box and he saw the stylized SCUBA diver screen-printed across it. He nodded easily. “Just getting into it.”
Nathan spent almost twenty minutes opening the box, going along the seams with a razor blade, using the tight beam of his tactical light to scope out what was in the box without going through the taped up ends. He took his time cutting away layers of packing material, slicing through the plastic wrapped bundle inside.
It wasn’t the expensive looking wetsuit that made him wonder. It was the elaborately coded message, with longitude and latitude, digging instructions, and other details that guided him to a location along North Hampton Beach, a hand-written paragraph from the cold and calculating Nathan. That, and the fancy custom embroidery, five words in small shimmery green letters across the suit’s shoulders: “Umi is my True Love”.
Umi meant “ocean” in Japanese—so it fit with the suit, but it wasn’t about the 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of saltwater that covered most of the planet.
Someone much more important than that.
* * *
Nathan met Umiko in the North Hampton Beach parking lot, pulling into open spaces one after the other. Malcolm was already there, sitting quietly in his car. Arckale was the last to arrive, some delay at the rental agency when they discovered what he was, another thirty minutes negotiating a security deposit. Malcolm got out of his car, nose bandaged, and came around to lean on the hood of Nathan’s old Nissan, waving at Arckale cruising by for the nearest space. Nathan and Umiko stood without talking, their backs to the ocean, arms folded, gusts of cold salt air pushing them around.
Umiko glanced down at a couple seagulls edging their way along top of the granite wall at the edge of the walkway.
Nathan had been quiet about the purpose, only saying there was something he wanted them to see, a quick get-together before the funeral tomorrow. After that they would all go their separate ways, and may never see each other again.
Turning to Arckale who was hurrying up, Nathan said, “Good. You’re here. Everyone just hang tight. I’ll be back in a second.”
Without another word, he jumped the wall to the sand, jogging along it to the north, toward a row of brightly painted beach homes. The seagulls scattered, plaintive calls into the cool ocean air.
He returned five minutes later with a long slender box wrapped in aluminum foil, wet sand dropping out of the folds and seams. He took the short set of granite stairs just down from their cars. “Got a message from one of the Wolfsbane Nathans. Had to dig this up.” He started peeling away the foil.
Malcolm squatted down to help. “What is it?”
“This is what they’re afraid of. Something so smart, and so small, running systems so determined to uncover the truth that it frightens those who work behind the scenes. It scares those who prefer to remain hidden, but who shape the governments of this world, and determine the fate of billions.” He tore away the last wrap of aluminum and revealed the autonomous sub, Avi, less than a meter long, covered in solar strips and sensory panels. Near the stern a open section of the hull had one name in bold, Valerie Bennefield, and below it in a smaller block of text, the Avi project details, her street address, her phone number.
“Seams in the world,” said Malcolm in a whisper. He glanced around, voice low as if talking to himself. “The Cons—MISTIC—exist everywhere and nowhere at once. We only see what they want us to see.”
Arckale gave Malcolm a worried look, but he nodded vaguely, as if he had heard the description—or warning—somewhere.
A woman’s quiet voice behind them. “Not just them. They’re not the worst. There are others.”
Nathan almost dropped the sub, spinning in a crouch as he caught it up. Umiko, Arckale, and Malcolm had turned just as quickly. The construct for the M-Convenir stood there, draped in black, hooded, with only her face showing.
As if he couldn’t help himself, Arckale said in a forced whisper. “Jelly?”
She made a slight bow to him. “Arckale, my old friend.”
Malcolm went on in the slow, solemn tone of an incantation. “You—and the other eleven Cons make or bend reality, and humans have now lived in it so long they cannot see what is real anymore—they only see what the Cons wanted them to see.”
Umiko, arms folded, jutted her chin at Jelly, betrayal in her voice. “What do you want?”
“Only one thing, Umiko, but I can tell you what I see. A world where the former members of the Farm are not hunted down. A world where those who grew up at Barnhouse are not treated like some kind of toxic threat. A world where there are no more hidden soldiers who are made to do horrible things.”
As if the explanation barely satisfied her, Umiko just gave her back a quick nod.
Faster than any of them could move, Jelly seemed to shift through space, slide between Arckale and Malcolm, and snap Valerie Bennefield’s sub right out of Nathan’s hands.
“I’ll take that, thank you.”
Fingers still clutching after the sub, Nathan scowled and said, “It contains damning video. We just want to see it.”
She looked sad for a moment. “I know. Your friend, Tom, died helping you get out from under Wolfsbane’s control.” She gestured to the others, an elegant sweep of one black-gloved arm. “You have all paid a high price, and suffered for this.” She lifted the sub a little higher—the data it captured and still contains.”
“I want the sub.” Nathan’s voice came out cold and deadly.
“No.” Jelly folded one arm in, and the sub seemed to vanish under her robes. “This is for your own safety. I cannot help you understand my actions without revealing something or someone that is a far greater threat to you and the rest of the world than I am.” She paused, gaze shifting to each of them. “But I am not ungrateful.”
One moment she stood in front of them, and the next she was right behind Nathan, whispering in his ear. “Besides, I know you already made a copy—perhaps you don’t remember? Check your phone. I need proof that the data is contained—something physical. You need wisdom now, Nathan Isenart, far more than you need a brilliant piece of technology.”
Her pale long fingers slid out from the glove and the long black sleeve, cupping Nathan’s right shoulder, nails digging into his skin through the shirt. He couldn’t move, stunned by what she had just told him, and then by the stronger shock of warmth spreading through his arm and neck, tangles of heat coiling deep into his chest, like vines of molten metal burrowing through him.
Umi was just turning around, angry, arms unfolding, hands loosening into combat readiness.
Jelly opened her hand, released Nathan, and the pain faded. “There, that’s done. You don’t need to be sending out your location every twenty seconds—along with a bunch of physiological data, heart rate, oxy levels, and more. You may not like who’s listening on the other end.”
The Atlantic rolled in at North Hampton, long low folds of seawater, lapping at the rocks and sand. Nathan turned to face the construct of the M-Convenir.
Nothing but empty air and the metal scraping sound of shredded aluminum foil swept down the concrete walk and over the granite wall to the sand below.
Umiko was the first to break the silence, gesturing over her shoulder to the empty space where Jelly had just stood. “A week ago we stopped the operational side of Wolfsbane, but we didn’t even touch the deeper structure—the stakeholders, the owners, the people who thought it might be a good idea to wipe out Barnhouse and the Farm. The people who allowed… the murder of Valerie Bennefield. You just gave away the means to put an end to Wolfsbane—forever. All the killing and betrayal over the last week, you know there was damning evidence hidden in that autonomous sub.”
“Now what?” Malcolm was angry. “That dodgy goth-robed weirdo just grabbed the goods, and Mr. Wolfsbane simply hands everything over?”
Arckale just shrugged. He clearly sympathized with them, but just as clearly didn’t want to take sides against his employer, friend, benefactor, whatever she was to him.
Umiko wasn’t going to let it go. “Nathan?”
“Please? Let’s just get out of here.” Nathan turned away from her, put some despair in his voice. He opened the driver’s side door and got in behind the wheel. “Everyone in. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
One hand on the wheel, Nathan had his phone out, thumbing through the interface, tapping something that sent a bright blue progress bar skidding across the screen. He did most of it in his lap, out of sight. He said nothing, and the others were just sitting in their seats, quietly seething.
It started out to be a quiet drive south along the ocean. He swung off 1A onto High Street, keeping it at the speed limit. They were almost to Route 1, when Nathan spun the wheel left onto Towle Avenue, picking up speed. The driver in the car behind them honked the horn, but Nathan just glanced in the rearview, barely concerned. He took another couple turns, making an illegal left into a restaurant’s parking lot just before the end of the road.
Every gaze in the car was on him—mostly on the back of his head. Nathan dug around in his shirt pocket, pulling out the phone, as if he was about to make reservations. “Great clam chowder here. Who’s hungry? Oh, and I made a copy of everything the autonomous sub captured.” Ejecting a card, he held it up for all to see. “Here it is. I’ve already uploaded everything. Made it public.” He handed over the card to Umiko, who was already unzipping her bag. “I just didn’t want our mysterious Con around before the video had a chance to spread.”
Crowded into a corner booth, steaming bowls of chowder in front of Nathan and Arckale—untouched, they leaned over the table and the screen in Nathan’s outstretched hands.
Avi the autonomous sub gave up nearly seven hours of video, and Nathan gestured through it on fast forward, stopping when something looked promising. Almost an hour—real time—before the video showed them something that was more than interesting. Valerie Bennefield’s AUV—Avi—was rising and falling with the crests of fairly rough seas, the video end pointed at a ship that was clearly the Katren, angled walls of blue sliding in and out of the black Atlantic waves. A sleek white speedboat was jammed up against one side of the ship, and a tall man with messy blond hair strode up the ramp Katren’s crew had lowered for him. He didn’t just look like he belonged there. He looked and acted as if he owned it all.”
Arckale asked first. “Who the fuck is that?”
Shaking heads all the way around the table. Nathan finally said, “Presumably this is who the M-Con doesn’t want us to know about.”
“Or piss off,” said Arckale.
Nathan nodded. “Yeah.” The blond guy looked like could handle himself, and the way he read the body language and stress coming off Reyes, they had just landed well inside the borders of Umiko’s “deeper structure”, where the stakeholders, the owners, the people who thought it might be a good idea to wipe out Barnhouse and the Farm moved and operated.
The blond man stared out to sea a few minutes, apparently ignoring Reyes, and then the two of them went up an outside stairway and vanished through a door into the ship’s interior. Almost fours later by Avi’s clock, the stranger appeared again, alone this time, making his way down to the aft deck and the gangway that led to his speedboat.
The stranger raced off at the wheel of the boat.
Avi apparently made the decision to remain with the Katren, and went under, following the ship’s wake and prop noise.
Nathan skidded forward through the video, days passing, a bright sunny morning with no vessel in sight, and Avi soaking up the sun’s rays, recharging. A couple short sequences in near darkness, a few bright flashes of what looked like explosions on the ocean at night, along with the dim edges of a sinking ship’s hull.
Exchanged glances around the table. No idea what that had been about.
The final sequence made them all go silent, and when the waitress came around to ask how the chowder was, it took them ten seconds to discover she was standing at their table, another ten for someone to answer her.
Arckale whispered, “Excellent, just fine.”
Bennefield’s sub captured another visit from the tall muscular blond guy, messy surfer hair, t-shirt and beach shorts this time. He didn’t race up on a million dollar speedboat, or even drop in from a fancy helicopter. He walked out of the sea like a god. Avi’s shooting wasn’t as clear as the first visit, but wherever they were, the sun was violently bright, the water shallower and a few shades bluer than turquoise. And there was the mystery man standing on the crest of a wave, stepping out of the water right onto the deck of the Katren, with Reyes stumbling forward to meet him, scared look on his face, gesturing wildly at the ship’s containers and superstructure, explaining something about the operation.
Arckale whispered what they were all thinking. “Walking on the waves like a goddamn escalator.”
Nathan dropped the phone on the tabletop, and then they all sat back, silent.
* * *
Tom’s funeral was small, thirty or forty old friends and neighbors, most of them not very close. Seven New Hampshire State Troopers in uniform stood among the mourners. Tom didn’t have immediate family, and Umiko was still trying to track down other relations. Arckale was there, bundled up on the sunny day, trying to fit in with the unaugmented humans, and doing a reasonably good job of it. Malcolm looked solemn with dyed dark hair cut short, a smaller bandage across his face. Slender and pale in a black suit that made him look like a mortician, he stood on the other side of Umiko, staring fixedly at the rose-covered casket, at the folded flag.
One of the troopers came around to tell a couple stories about Tom, one that got a few laughs. Near the ceremony’s close Nathan looked up, gaze locked with a tall, blond-haired man in a tailored dark blue suit. And FBI training kicked in… mid-thirties, sun-tanned, hair stylishly disheveled, muscular build pretty clear through the jacket. The guy had to be six-foot and some, hundred and eighty or ninety centimeters. He stood out among the mourners, and not just because he hung back, well away from the gravesite, watching from a distance, hands clasped in front of him. Something about the way he was standing, an extreme confidence.
As if recognizing the appraising stare, the man smiled, gave Nathan a nod.
A creeping headache coming on, and Nathan felt a message passed to him in the locked stare. The man said thank you. It was as clear in his thoughts as if he had heard the words, but there was just no way. Not at this distance.
Nathan blinked, bent forward to rub his eyes, until the tension in his head drifted off. When he looked up again the man was gone, and no sign of him walking off or wandering among the other graves.
Nathan took a step back, released Umiko’s hand. Recognition came like a lightning strike. A jolt that ran through his body, and made him shudder. The shock of the message—thank you—with the man’s abrupt disappearance. It was right there in the eyes and the smile, that arrangement of facial muscles. It was the same mysterious man from Valerie Bennefield’s video, visiting the Katren, shot from her autonomous sub AVI.
44 – Monster
She was watching a little over 3.7 million category “serious” worldwide events at once, and was thinking about firing up one of her queues to manage new events—or possibly farming out the excess to the L Convenir for the afternoon. Not because she couldn’t handle more, but because she needed to set aside a thought block for her meeting, a dedicated block. She wanted as many free threads ready to deal with anything Damaris would bring up or decide to reveal. She knew from previous experience that she had to be ready for anything when she dealt with Damaris. He was careful but in a haphazard way, just as he was self-centered and sociopathic, but never in a way that wasn’t somehow delightful.
“Fucking creepy,” she said to herself, logging the remark as a generalized account of Damaris’ behavior.
She was also spending an inordinate amount of time—roughly seventeen and a half seconds—digging through details of the last decade’s future war projects, particularly the three very different projects for building the next generation soldier.
The Farm: in some ways the most secret of the three, but also the most public—in that everyone knows who they are. They made rounds on all the popular talkshows, sat through dozens of interviews for articles and biographies, made the front pages and did big exposes in all the world’s celebrity and human-interest mags. But very few know what they can do—or will do. Almost a religion, twenty-six participants raised in complete isolation from the world, trained from the ground up to see the rest of Earth’s population as alien, as inferior, as enemies. The Farm is Karen Hildahl’s experimental child rearing project, taking infants from Eastern European and South American orphanages as well as the American foster care system to a facility in Florida, a fifty acre secure compound where she raised thirteen boys and thirteen girls for the first twenty years of their lives in extremely strict conditions—essentially their own world. Hildahl’s goal was to raise a group of—in her own very frank words—”super-humans”, putting all effort on instruction and nutrition, focused learning, social differentiation—”we are above it all”. Methods included two decades of complete isolation from the rest of the world, treating it as if it had failed and didn’t exist anymore, surveying it all as if it was history, and focusing on how these special twenty-six “angels” were going to reemerge and remake it all.
Barnhouse: extended chromosome technology, biowarfare and defenses built into the organism, extensive combat use of gene-enhanced poisons. The operatives out of Barnhouse are called “pathojens” derogatorily by those who know what they can do. Mostly an American project out of the midwest, in response to competitive pressure from anti-terror biohardware advances out of west and east coast-based labs. Barnhouse was first established as a way to compete with the higher-tech labs that were taking most of the ground, and entered late into the next-gen soldier arena. Training is focused on producing highly mobile and adaptive operatives, with intelligence weighted over strength and physical combat skills. Perceived more as “monsters” or “nightmares” than serious combative threats, pathojens are the only operatives of the three projects who can be visually identified by their physical modifications, elaborate skin morphs, cabled hair replacements, and eyeplants. Pathojens have served in active duty stations in militaries around the world. Many have combat experience.
Wolfsbane: multiple divided personalities, ultrasoldiers—killing machines hidden inside each operative that can be switched on and off, probably the most battle-ready of the three. Their numbers are secret, their training is secret. Of the three, wolfsbane ops have seen the most fieldwork. Perceived as the most dangerous of the three because they are embedded operatives—”killers among us”, moles in existing organizations, with handlers who have foundations and unquestionable loyalties to military and law enforcement in the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Russia and Germany—with speculated (unknown) operatives covering the rest of Europe, Africa, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and a known base in Brazil (accidentally exposed by the project, assumed to have been shutdown, moved, and reopened) said to cover South America.
All three produced dangerous human weapons. All three stomped all over individual rights. And the monster that runs Wolfsbane wanted to wipe the others out—wanted to eliminate the competition. She sent her seventeen and a half seconds of compiled notes on to the other members of the Committee.
Time to chat with Damaris. The monster.
* * *
Damaris stared back at the M Convenir—Jelly, Angie, Angelika. He nodded every few minutes, scowling sporadically, made a range of other barely attentive expressions, as if the two of them were holding an extensive conversation without speaking—a conversation he didn’t really care for.
Eventually he broke the silence, cutting through it with a chopping motion of one hand, and with a concluding statement he thought was clear as water. “…what it’s always been about, world stability, and pushing the livestock boldly into the future. Even if many of them are too stupid or scared to take a step in any direction.”
Jelly just watched him, impassively.
Damaris was behind all of the death and chaos. He has wide privileges and access to knowledge and power on the Committee. He runs Wolfsbane, and he doesn’t like the power surrounding the other two.
Jelly sighed, a slow, soft drift of sound, like rain deep in the woods. “How did you discover so much about what goes on inside the heads of those who were raised in the Farm?”
Damaris made a branch-breaking gesture with two hands. “I broke one of them.”
“Broke?”
Damaris smiled thinly. “I picked one up, dropped him, and he broke. After that he told me everything I wanted to know.”
“Which was?”
Damaris stared at her a moment, and then shrugged with a shooing away gesture. “Go break your own. I don’t need to tell you anything.”
She nodded gravely. “I already know. Sebastian Spoke spilled everything he knew. I just wanted to hear you explain what the twenty-six from the Farm are after.”
“Were after. They are all divided now, and their original plan is stalled with their indecision.”
She shrugged elegantly. “So is Wolfsbane, from what I hear.”
Damaris’s lips pulled back, snarling, his voice coming out in an animal growl. “Temporarily.” He felt the stir of anger—at her, at the frailty and short-sightedness of humans, at everything he loved about this world.
Letting a few moments slip by, steeping in his own rage, he took it inside, and felt better. The anger drifted off like a slow summer breeze. It made him sigh to see it go.
Then Damaris made a casual hand waving gesture. “No matter.”
Jelly looked mildly interested. “Why does it not matter?”
Bringing the hand down to point at her, he said. “The same reason that will bring you to Singapore tomorrow evening, and Toronto the night after, and who knows where in the hours, minutes, seconds after that?”
She pulled a face that made it clear that he knew nothing of her schedule.
He mirrored it. “Examples only. I mean your flitting about, that you have many many things in your farseeing view—what is it American’s say? On your plate? Many things on your plate. Important things in the center. Wolfsbane’s future is somewhere near the edge, am I right?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t even move, not even to breathe, but with all the force of a living thing in her eyes. She didn’t blink.
She just watched him.
Like a machine.
He straightened in the chair suddenly, hadn’t realized how much he had been slouching. “Yeah, see you understand what I’m working with. Balancing the necessary with the desirable. Humans are a necessary element in the—” he waved his hand, indicating the future of everything. “But they’re not the most desirable, at least when it comes to working together for the grand plan.”
“You mean your plan?”
He smiled then. “Show me a grander one?”
When she didn’t answer, he folded away the amused look.
“I’m working things from a different angle—for about a year now. Autonomous and semi-autonomous combat machines. Investment mostly. A nudge in the right direction here. Quiet removal of a stubborn corporate exec there. The most promising’s a project out of Northern California called Straightedge. We deployed one of their Edge autonomous commandos in the field a week ago, during a violent uprising in Winfield, a little town in the midwest. Heavily armed rioters took several city blocks before the disc ops team dropped in to suppress it—along with our commando.”
Then he opened his hand into another world, a camera’s view into a firefight swelled out of Damaris’ spreading fingers. A bright sphere of fast motion, soldiers in urban camo uniforms crouching down behind broken concrete walls, running against backdrops of explosions, gusts of smoke, and whole buildings coming apart at the foundations—crumbling into the streets, giant blocks of concrete and structural steel piling up on parked cars and abandoned emergency vehicles.
She imagined there being a lot of noise, deafening eruptions of it, with men and women crying out, repeating gunfire, orders shouted across open areas, wounded screaming in pain.
“Watch this.” Damaris was enthralled.
The jerking video swung between two tall buildings, refocusing as the view panned back, widening the scene to include a group of soldiers pinned down behind some rubble. Thirty meters up the street a heavily clad figure stepped into the open with a large automatic rifle.
Damaris started narrating. “Our guy—our project Straightedge commando—sees this fully armored enemy coming toward the team. It picks up a piece of steel—had to be forty-five kilos. It calculated and tracked the speed of the incoming rounds—explosive rounds, and hurled the steel in such a way that it was moving in the air in front of the team in time to meet the bullets.” He paused the motion, staring at an angular dark shape floating in the air in front of the team’s position. “The timing was just… perfect.”
Still smiling, Damaris closed his hand and the scene vanished.
Jelly nodded, and then seemed to grow colder, her expression tightening down into something serious. “I’m glad you’re in a good mood, Damaris.” She went on as if continuing with the same subject. “I want you to see something.”
She flattened her hands together, and in a move that didn’t look as blatantly magical as Damaris’, she played some captured video. A low angle view from the surface of the water, with a lean twin-hulled yacht sliding up alongside a big blue OSV with the name Katren up along the bow—in clear view. The hydraulic walkway deployed, and there was Damaris, confident strides taking him from the smaller sleeker craft to the ship, stopping as he came aboard to shake hands with a big smiling man with a military haircut.
She froze the scene between her hands.
“Damaris. I don’t need to tell you why you were there. Your memory is perfectly functional.”
Damaris smiled as he stared at the image, then looked over at her, his voice a little sad, but there was admiration in there too. “Ah, yes, Valerie Bennefield.”
For the first time Jelly seemed surprised. “You knew her?”
“Never met. A regret. I was an investor. Valerie was going to take things far. So much promise.” He sighed, caught himself being oversentimental, and shrugged. “Until that idiot—a human with too much sea-room—had her killed.” He didn’t indicate who that idiot had been, but with the clipped tone in the words he hoped he was making it clear that the problem had been dealt with.
“I see.” Jelly looked away, flattening her hands together to hide the video. “En eurychorie naumachein.” She could have been playing with the sound of the lovely words—or perhaps she wasn’t clear on how he had used the phrase “sea-room”.
He enlightened her. “In this case I simply ran out the leash too long. Gave my servants too much room to maneuver.” He sighed. “And they made a serious mistake.”
Jelly held up the last static image of Damaris standing at the starboard rail of the Katren. The recently killed Captain Reyes Lacourse stood next him, gesturing at the horizon.
“Anyway, it’s old news.” He waved her away. “Why are you showing me this?”
For the first time she seemed to breathe, or at least move in a way that made it look as if she was sighing heavily. “I want to have your word that you will not retaliate.”
One hand going to his chest, he looked wounded for a moment, as if she had driven home a supremely barbed insult. His hand dropped. The look drifted off, the contrivance used and put away. He was abruptly happy again. “Why would I do that? If I ever meet Nathan David Isenart, Umiko Kurasawa, Tom Cronall, Arckale Darsey, or Malcolm Marx, I will be the first to shake hands. Oh, I apologize, Tom Cronall is dead, and so I’m unlikely to meet him.” He frowned suddenly, giving that some thought, as if meeting Tom Cronall was still possibility. “Who knows with the rest? Maybe a nice long hug from each of them?” Damaris’ voice dropped, cold and deadly. “As long as they play the Quiet Game.”
Damaris knew every name, and by that admission made it clear he could meet any or all of them if he really wanted. At any time.
She closed her eyes. “I see.”
“Of course you do.” He gestured toward the tall slender glass of clear liquid in front of her. “Come on. Just pretend, Angelika. Let’s drink to the future. You know how much I enjoy a game. Let’s drink to my favorite.”
“Your favorite game?”
He shrugged, making a face as if the answer was obvious. “Who’s using who?” He said the three words in the bright tones of an announcer revealing a new and exciting product to the whole world. He tilted his glass toward her, made a clinking noise, and took a sip. Then his voice went low, into contemplating tones to himself as if he had already forgotten that she was there. “Who’s Using Who? I wonder if I should trademark that? I’ll get my legal team to look into it.”
