“Sure he does. Can you name a single good one?”
“Who said they had to be good?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe he just wants to see how we’re going to react.”
“You think he finds this amusing?”
“I think he might,” she says. She smiles slightly. “Don’t you?”
“Did you ever think you’d see me again?”
“I figured the odds were against it.”
“I tell you what’s funny,” he says. “What’s funny is how it seemed so secret at the time. It seemed like we were fooling them back in the academy. A month in the real world—a month into the runs and out of training, and it was clear they must have known all along.”
“Yes.”
“They were watching us the whole time,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Is that what’s got you so rattled?”
“I’m not rattled,” she says. “They’re rattled.”
“Obviously,” he replies. “They briefed us in real-time.”
“They briefed us together. Even in the secondary briefings, I’m always the only agent.”
“That’s the way all of CI works,” he says. “I’ve never met another agent save in the field. I’ve never known an agent who had.”
“Or at least, that would admit to it.”
“And we were briefed by Sinclair himself.”
“Or by something that wore his face.”
“But why would it have done that?”
“To inspire us,” says Haskell dryly.
“And are you inspired?”
“To stop the Rain? Absolutely. To serve the greater glory of CICom? Sure. To help Matthew Sinclair help Matthew Sinclair? Why not?”
“You don’t sound that convinced.”
She says something he doesn’t quite catch.
“What was that?”
“I said Sinclair’s a bastard.”
He stares at her. He glances at the ’copter’s walls. She sneers.
“What does it matter if he hears us now? He heard us fuck all those years ago. He’s heard all there is to hear. He’s a degenerate. A dirty old man.”
Marlowe has no idea what to say to that. So he says nothing.
“Besides,” she says, “it’s not like he’s going to hear anything new. I’ve been telling the microphones this for years. I’ve told him how much I fucking hate him. Told him how much I love him too. But never anything he didn’t already know.” And then a snarl in response to whatever Marlowe’s about to say: “Well, why the fuck wouldn’t he already know? He’s the one who fucking set me up this way. So why in God’s name am I so ashamed of the way I’ve been configured?”
She wipes at her eyes. “Shit,” she says.
“Is this why you haven’t been speaking to me?” Marlowe asks.
“No,” she says. “There’s something else.”
“That something being my being back in your life?”
“That sounds like wishful thinking.”
He doesn’t reply.
“Look,” she says, “all I’m saying is that we can never forget that Sinclair’s the one who handles the handlers. We can never forget he’s the master Operator of them all. That’s all.”
“You just changed the subject,” says Marlowe.
“Sorry?”
“I was talking about us.”
“What’s there to talk about?” she asks.
“What you’re not telling me.”
“What am I not telling you?”
“What’s really got you so rattled.”
“Look,” she says, “enough with all the questions. Enough with the interrogation. Or is this some kind of seduction? I’ve read your files, Jason—”
“You’ve read my files?”
“—and you know what? I can’t say I like the man you’ve become. Whatever you’re not trying to kill, you’re trying to fuck. Believe me, Jason: you’d better be ready to make an exception.”
“Who gave you my fucking files?”
“Sinclair.”
“Sinclair?” Marlowe’s as angry as he is puzzled.
“Or whoever’s speaking for him. Think about it, Jason. I’m the razor. You’re the mechanic. Which means you’re reporting to me.”
Marlowe shakes his head. “Hey,” he says. “Relax. I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”
“Good,” she says.
“I just want to know what you’ve discovered.”
“What have I discovered?” she asks in a voice that would fool anybody else.
“Something you shouldn’t have.”
She stares.
“I know that look,” he says. “The look that says you’re holding out on everybody. It was driving me crazy throughout the briefing with Sinclair.”
“Driving you crazy?” It’s a good half-second before Marlowe realizes that her question is sounding in his skull and not in the air around him. That Haskell has spoken aloud the very next moment: scorning him for trying to get inside her pants, then cutting off the conversation. She sits there, apparently simmering. But her words sound in Marlowe’s head anyway.
“The one-on-one,” she says.
Not that she needs to. He’s switching into it seamlessly, neural implants letting words flick between them.
“You’re doing this in code?”
“The only safe way,” she replies.
“How did you get my side of the cipher?”
“When I gave your systems that boost back in that city.”
“I thought that was just my suit.”
“Your head wasn’t that much farther away.”
“So what is it you want to tell me?”
“That I made covert downloads in the Citadel.”
“The Citadel? You mean, in South America—”
She nods.
“When?”
“While you were out there slugging it out with the Jaguars on the roof. I downloaded every file that was still intact.”
“CI files?”
“Of course. That’s who owns the Citadel, right?”
“That’s who used to.”
“Right,” she says. “Anyway, the files didn’t help us. Most of it was wiped by EMP anyway. And then that zeppelin started signaling. So I never mentioned it.”
“If you had, you’d be facing a court-martial,” he says. “Jesus, Claire. What the fuck were you hoping to find? What the hell could justify hacking classified seals?”
“How the fuck should I know, Jason? Maybe I was gonna find the blueprint of an escape route. Maybe the location of a distress beacon. Or the coordinates of some evac point. Or anything that would have kept the militia from using their machetes to cut me extra orifices while they raped me from every direction.”
Her voice dies away inside in his head. He sits amidst that silence. Emotions tear at him—fear for this woman, fear of this woman, all of it bound up in something else that he can’t name. He tears away from all of it, focuses:
“So what did you find?”
“Like I said, nothing at the time. But once they’d repaired the damage my cranial software had sustained from the EMP, I went back to those downloads with a revamped toolkit. Some of the data wasn’t recoverable. Some of it was. Some of it dealt with us.”
“One of the files talked about us?”
“Not you and me specifically. Or maybe it did. I don’t know.”
“What did it say?”
“Our memories—” Her voice trails off.
“Yes?”
“May be manufactured.”
“Manufactured.”
“Yes.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they might have been implanted by the handlers.”
“Why?”
“Presumably to render their asses even more secure than they already are.”
He doesn’t reply.
“Surely I haven’t left you speechless? The handlers brief us in the trance to prevent turned agents from rolling up the network. They’re pros at using the deployment of memory to further their control. If they controlled our waking memories as well, they could configure that memory between missions. Which would make it irrelevant that an agent has been turned. Just install new programs and reboot.”