John Birmingham: Final impact

She was heading for the bedroom, glass of water in hand, ready to flake out for about twenty-four hours, when her eyes fell on a package from her lawyer in California. Maria O’Brien had moved out to the Valley when her firm’s headquarters had been completed, and they talked only infrequently at the moment. Julia had given her a check-signing authority for her investment account; all she really needed to do was sit back and watch it grow exponentially. Two years ago that would have been enough to keep her entirely happy. Now, as long as the money was always there, she was largely disinterested in the actual math.

Still, at least it wasn’t hate mail-or even worse, fan mail.

She grabbed the parcel on her way past. It might be dull enough to lull her off to sleep.

Julia had a long hot shower, followed by a short cold one. It’d been a stinking night outside, and she had the contemporary air-conditioning cranked up high. It was an AT Carrier model mean to chill a restaurant much bigger than her place. Domestic A/C hadn’t really taken off yet. Stepping out of the cold shower into the frigid dehumidified air felt like an insane luxury after the steam-press heat of the streets.

Wrapping a silk kimono around herself, Julia walked to her bedroom, her legs aching in anticipation of her collapsing onto the mattress. She ripped open the parcel and tipped out another sealed package and a handwritten note. It was from Maria.

Hey Jules,

This was sent to you c/o the office out here. Our security guys checked it. No boom-boom. But it’s marked confidential, so that’s all I can tell you. Call me if you need a hand.

Best,

Maria

The note was dated for the previous day. Frowning, she checked the outer parcel and saw that it had no postage marks. It’d been hand-delivered via the front desk while she was out at the dinner.

Julia opened the inner parcel and spilled the contents out onto her sheets. A photograph came down next to her pillow, and she was more than a little surprised to see Artie Snider’s mug grinning up at her. She grinned back. She hadn’t seen the big palooka in ages. Not since he’d turned up at that Kennedy gig with Slim Jim Davidson. What a fucking night that’d been…

She wondered if there was a letter from JFK somewhere in that mail mountain out in her kitchen. She hadn’t seem him in ages, either, and he’d hopefully be getting home soon. Maybe she should call him, like he’d said.

Curious now, she turned to the other documents, instantly recognizing a DNA graphic and wondering what the hell this was about. Less than two minutes later she knew: with her head spinning and her stomach lurching, she rushed over to the toilet bowl in her en-suite bathroom to vomit.

Snider, the war hero she’d help create, was the killer, or at least one of the killers of Daytona Anderson and Maseo Miyazaki.

He hadn’t been tried, of course, but the documentation was damning.

Where the hell had it come from?

And then, asking the question, it became clear.

From her lawyer. Maria O’Brien. The West Coast Quiet Room controller.

With shaking hands, sniffing to clear her blocked nose, she read the note again.

Call me if you need a hand.

Julia Duffy, the Quiet Room agent, opened the drawer of a bedside table and retrieved a flexipad. Rosanna’s old Samsung.

She powered up and walked unsteadily over to the phone, removing the jack and hooking the Samsung into the phone network via a plug-in adaptor. Keying in a code on the touchpad, she waited while software agents negotiated their path through the old copper wire network to a black server somewhere in LA. As the pad logged in, security software at both ends engaged and began an elaborate verification procedure.

After a long wait, a chime told her she had a message.

Unable to stop herself she looked back over her shoulder. The apartment was empty, as she had known, rationally, it had to be.

Julia opened the message. A vid-mail that would hard-delete after she had watched it. It was O’Brien.

“Sorry, babe,” she said. “I have something for you, for a change. Snider, as you’ve gathered. He’s unfinished business. We can’t officially sanction him, of course. But you can do your thing with the data I’ve sent through. Good luck. I’ll see you for lunch next time you’re in town.”

The screen folded in on itself and the pad beeped three times to let her know the file had been erased at a quantum level.

All the fatigue that had threatened to drag her low vanished as she began to sort through the papers.

She had already hardened her heart to the task ahead.

As much as she had liked Snider, there was no chance of her turning this one down. They were in a war here. Not a shooting war, exactly. Not like the one that had just ended, or the next one that seemed to be coming on them like a fast-moving hurricane front. But a war nonetheless.

In his own dim way Snider had probably known that. Sifting through the papers, it seemed obvious he hadn’t acted alone-that he’d probably been under orders of some sort. She began to arrange the pieces of the puzzle on her bed.

He wasn’t an enemy combatant. He couldn’t be sanctioned.

But he could be destroyed as a man in front of the world. Left with nothing but his shame and humiliation. An effective Sanction 5, if not an official one. And in her experience these things tended to end the same way anyhow.

They certainly had with Hoover, her last Quiet Room target.

Julia Duffy unplugged her flexipad and hooked up the phone again. She placed a call to the night editor. He answered on the second ring.

“Hey, David. It’s me, Duffy,” she said.

“Hello, Julia. I thought you were at the big dinner tonight. What’s up?”

“Same old same old, Dave. I’ve got a story we need to run. Nobody’s going to like it, but we need to run with it anyway, okay?”

The editor sounded unsure. “Well, it’s too late for tomorrow’s issue, Julia, we-”

“Don’t worry. I don’t need tomorrow. I probably won’t file for about two weeks. I’m going to have a lot of research to do. I just need you to write me up as being out on a job tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay. Where are you going?”

“The Zone.”