James Knapp - The Silent Army

That was lucky; if it was the ship we were looking for, it was in UAC waters. We could seize it.

Are they sure it’s the right one?

It has to be. It was practically invisible since it’s running on minimal power, and the comms, transponder, and sat-nav are all dark. It’s hiding.

We need to coordinate with the Coast Guard.

Already on it. They’re putting a safety and security team together. You can go in by air.

Understood.

The team will be assembled and ready for launch within the hour. Be ready.

Zooming in, I followed the footsteps from the toilet back out the bathroom door. They didn’t head left, for the bedroom, or right, back to the living room. They went right up to the wall across from the bathroom door. A large flag from one of the African republics was hung there from ceiling to floor.

I knelt down. The stride of the footsteps took them right into the wall. There was heat concentrated at the base of the flag, rippling out from underneath it.

I pushed the flag out of the way. There was a door hidden behind it. Whoever the footprints belonged to, that was where they’d gone. Another pair overlapped them, heading back out in the opposite direction. I knocked quietly.

“Cal?”

No one answered. I didn’t hear any movement. Looking through the front of the door, I couldn’t make out anyone inside.

I turned the knob—it was open. I pushed open the door. It was warmer inside than in the rest of the apartment, and dark. The air smelled like rubbing alcohol and body odor. I reached over and flipped on the lights.

Shit.

Clear plastic covered the floor and had been stapled up the length of every wall. A hospital gurney sat in the middle of the room, flanked by two surgical trays. An IV rack had two bags hanging from it, one of clear fluid and one of blood. Both were mostly empty, the tubes trailing to the floor. Blood spots dotted the mattress on the gurney, and I could see bloodstained gauze wadded up in a wastebasket underneath it.

What is this?

There were scalpels and a suture needle on one of the trays, along with a spent hypo. Impressions were left in the plastic that covered the floor where boxes had been removed. It looked like most of the equipment had been packed up. Whatever happened here, it was over.

I looked around for anything that might tell me where she’d gone. On the metal frame of the gurney, someone had stuck a small note:

Destroy everything. Report to me.

The room wasn’t set up on the fly. From the look and smell of it, it had been occupied for days, maybe weeks. There was no way Calliope didn’t know it was there….

Unless she’d been made to forget.

Someone else must have been there, right in the apartment with her. Ai had planted someone there, and kept Calliope from consciously knowing about it. I stared at the surgical tools and the bloody gauze. What had they done to her?

I picked up my phone and called the contact number Ai had given me. A woman’s voice answered, but it didn’t sound like the woman from the restaurant.

“Hello?”

“This is Agent Wachalowski. Who am I speaking to?”

“You are speaking to Penny. What’s up, Agent?”

“I need to talk to Ai.”

“Oh, now you need to talk to her?”

“Can you put me through to her or not?”

“I can, but I’m not going to.”

“I—”

“Save the threats. I don’t care who you are; you don’t get to demand to talk to her. You’ll talk to me.”

“Put me through to Ai, or I’m hanging up.”

“Fine, but if you do that, you’ll never find out what happened to your friend.”

“What?”

“Your friend Flax. I assume that’s what this is about.”

“Where is she?”

“You found the room, didn’t you? Do you have any idea how many times I had to replant that memory so she’d remember seeing a wall instead of that door? She’s got a stubborn streak, that one.”

“If you know where she is, then tell me.”

“Not on the phone. I want to see you.”

“I don’t have time for this—”

“Make time. I’m at Zoe’s new place. You know where that is?”

“I …” it was the first I’d heard of it. I didn’t even realize Zoe had moved. “No, I don’t.”

“Of course not.”

“Look, just—”

“I’m sending the address. Decide what you want to do.”

She hung up. I checked the time. The MSST would be in the air in less than an hour.

If I hurried, I could make it.

I knelt near a pile of plastic trash bags and looked out through the mouth of the alleyway. Through the LW field, the people who flowed by had a ghostly look. Facial recognition software scanned each one, matching it against my target.

While I waited there, hidden, I looked through the array of my memories for other references to the strange woman. I found one other instance, before Flax had hauled her into the clean room. I’d seen her shortly after I’d been brought back. As the crowds of people streamed by the alley, I brought up the memory and looked inside.

I was in the underground storage unit where Nico buried his past. He brought me there so that he could bring me back, and no one would ever know. The concrete room was cluttered with forgotten boxes and old furniture. He’d chained my ankle to a grate in the floor, and he told me to stay still when a knock came on the heavy metal door.

I watched from next to the bed we’d once lain on, while he crossed the unit and opened the door. A tiny woman stood on the other side. She was zipped up in a huge purple parka, red hair sticking out from under a wool cap. She stared up at him from over a beaklike nose, and I saw heat stream through the veins in her face. She was excited by him.

She’d stepped closer, then, and spoke softly to him. I saw her pupils expand.

“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you so scared?”

“Don’t—”

She put one shaking hand on his. “Shhh.”

“Stop doing that,” he said.

“Why?”

She had put her other hand on his stomach and spread open her fingers.

“I know you miss it,” she said, putting her forehead to his chest. “I know you know how I feel. I wanted to thank you.”

“For what?”

“For caring about me, even a little bit.”

She was placing Nico under her control. At the time I didn’t realize what I’d seen, but I recognized it now. I saw the guilt in her eyes as she touched him, knowing his acceptance of it was coerced. I stepped out from the shadows, and she saw me.

“You’re dead—you can’t be here!”

She’d recognized me back then. We had never met, but still, she knew my face. She stared up at me, hands curled into tight fists, as heat coursed out from her chest. Even then there was something, some base instinct that told me she was trouble.

A small figure passed the mouth of the alley and toward the entrance to the convenience store. The computer took a snapshot of her face. It ran the comparison and got a match.

Target is spotted.

I stood and walked to the mouth of the alley. People streamed past me less than four feet away, but under the cloak, I was invisible. They’d see her, of course, and hear her if she screamed, but it would be over in a few seconds. By the time anyone realized she was dead, I would already be gone.

I watched her enter the store. Through the window, I watched her make her purchase. When she came out, she had a brown paper bag. Her red hair was draped around her sullen face, her lips drawn into a frown. She walked quickly, with her eyes on the sidewalk, and it looked like she’d been crying.