Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

“Please. John. Put down your gun.” There was nothing frail or weak about Lucia’s tone of voice now. “Do it now or I’ll shoot. You know I can, and you know I will.”

“Of course. That would be your way of taking responsibility for your own sins.” John Paul said as he pointed the Browning away from me. It only just occurred to me how long he had been talking —pretty impressive considering he had a gun shoved into the back of his head for most of it. What a bizarre situation. I walked over to him and plucked the gun from his hand.

“Mr. Bishop … What is your real name?” Lucia asked. I looked up at her face. Her eyes were clear. She knew exactly what she had to do. She was focused. I’d never once seen her with eyes like this when we were together in Prague.

“Clavis Shepherd. Captain. US Armed Forces, Intelligence.”

“Clavis. Please arrest this person.” Lucia’s voice was composed and clear. “Please arrest him and take him back to America. You need to bring the story of the grammar of genocide to trial. People need to know. People have a responsibility to find out. If your people truly want to be free and truly want to live in a free country, they need to take responsibility for that freedom. They need to accept the burdens that come with the freedom of being able to make choices.”

“Lucia, I’m afraid Clavis has orders to kill me.” John Paul smiled wistfully. “He is, after all, an assassin.”

I came here this night determined to kill this man. It was my own will. For once I wasn’t interested in what the NME wanted, or asked, or ordered. I just wanted to put an end to all the atrocities with my own hands, for my own sake.

And now Lucia, the only person in the world who could administer the punishment that I needed, was asking me to arrest John Paul and deliver him to justice instead of killing him as I had planned. As I had promised myself.

“This man’s research was highly classified,” I said. “There’s no public record of it. The same goes for all of our missions to date. There’s no corroborating evidence. Given that, do you really think that people will believe that this one man is the source of all the massacres and atrocities that have been occurring throughout the world?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe the jury will laugh the case out of court. But if you kill him now, if he’s killed before anyone has the opportunity to learn the truth, and everything is just brushed under the carpet, then as far as I’m concerned all the people who ever died in those massacres that he caused might as well have been killed by our hand. We’d be ignoring all the corpses just so that we can selfishly grab a little peace and quiet for ourselves. That would be unforgivable.”

Corpses.

Our world was built on top of corpses.

And it was filled with people who stood on a foundation of corpses and never suspected a thing.

But Lucia and I knew. That was the difference. We were past the point of no return. We couldn’t go on cashing in on the misery of others.

“Fine. Let’s take your John Paul with us and go,” I said.

Bzz . A sound. Lucia’s forehead expanded into a giant marshmallow. I stood there dumbly for a moment. Oh, a hollow-point bullet. I felt bizarrely calm. Lucia’s forehead burst like a ripe tomato. I was standing right in front of her, so some of her blood and brain matter splattered across my face.

Lucia’s left eye had been blown clean out of its socket; there was now a gaping hole where it used to be. What brain tissue she still had started oozing out through the new opening in her face. Lucia’s body shifted and toppled over, carried forward by the energy of the blast. She slumped over John Paul’s shoulders. Where she had been standing I could now see Williams, who was brandishing a handgun with a silencer attached.

“Lucia—”

She had lost half her head. A sight I’d seen numerous times before. It was a common enough way to go in battle. To have part of your face blown away by a bullet.

I screamed. No, I tried to scream, but no sound emerged. My mouth was wide open, but only my anguish came out. I pointed my rifle at Williams and fired.

Williams charged at me, right into my line of fire. He couldn’t stay where he was in the corridor—the guards would be here any second to investigate the sound of the gunshot.

“Clavis! Calm down! Our orders were to kill on sight!”

“She wasn’t the target! You didn’t need to kill her! You didn’t need to kill anybody!”

Williams had run into the bathroom. I could hear voices in the distance, outside the door. I shoved John Paul away from Williams’s line of fire and tossed him back his Browning.

“Use this to protect yourself,” I said. John Paul nodded in silent assent.

This was a small room. Once Williams came out of the bathroom it would be a close-range battle. A bloodbath. Well, the guards would get here first anyway.

“Why did you kill her?” I shouted.

“For Monita and my baby.” Williams’s voice was calm but forceful. “So that they don’t have to know what a shithole this world is. My baby doesn’t need to know that our world is teetering on the edge of the abyss. All she needs is the opportunity to grow up at her own pace, in our own world. Got that, Clavis? I’m prepared to protect my world. I’m going to defend the world where you can order a jalapeño pizza and pay for it by thumbprint. I’ll fight to the death for my family’s right to eat as many Big Macs as they like and then throw away whatever they can’t eat.”

I heard the sound of footsteps converging outside the door. The worst-case scenario now would be a three-way shootout involving myself, Williams, and the guards. And we were heading straight in that direction.

“Lucia didn’t need to die. And now you do. You have to die here,” I said.

“Clavis, buddy, calm down. We have to work together now, remember? You and me. The way it always is. The guards are coming. Cooperate with me, like we always do? Whaddaya say, buddy?”

“Sure, I’ll cooperate with you, buddy . I’ll cooperate with your corpse. After I’ve killed you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clavis. Look! Those were our orders, okay! Shoot to kill. You just weren’t told about them, that’s all. And I can see why now. Well, I was briefed to kill both Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. We have to wrap this case up once and for all. It comes straight from the top.”

“Why?”

The guards finally started amassing by the doorway, so I fired a suppressing volley, full automatic, in their direction. One of them took a hit to the shoulder and spun around before collapsing to the floor.

“Dude, think about it. Think of the scandal if it ever got out that DARPA funded the research that led to international genocide. And think how bad it’d be for morale if John Paul told the world his story. Specially all the stuff about the surveillance crap that we do being basically useless. How there’s no correlation between traceability and the fall in terrorism. Think how people would feel!”

“But there is no correlation, you idiot!”

“So what are you gonna do, huh?” Now Williams was shouting too. “Turn back time? The people want increased security measures, don’t forget! Not just the government and industry, ordinary citizens too. People are happy to sacrifice a few freedoms in exchange for a safer society. So tell me, Clavis, what are you gonna do? Dismantle the entire surveillance infrastructure? InfoSec is a huge industry, you know that. Money’s still being poured into it from all angles. It gives jobs to tens of thousands of people, if not more. And it’s part of the system now. So call me an idiot if you want, Clavis, but just tell me this. What are you gonna do?”