I speed-dial him while Charlene slides the computer onto her lap to watch the footage again. Xavier picks up, speaking quietly; apparently they’d just been escorted into RixoTray’s corporate headquarters and I’ve caught him in the hallway leading to the cybersecurity office. After quickly recounting what Charlene and I noticed, I ask him about the possibility of detonating C-4 by firing a round into it.
There’s a pause as he considers my question.
“No. C-4 is a secondary explosive, needs a primer… but if the sniper aimed for the primer or the electronic control, it might. Depends on the configuration and design of the vest, where the bullet struck. The point of impact might also explain the brief delay, why there was actually time to see the curtains flutter. But a sniper wouldn’t aim for the vest. He’d aim for the head.”
“Unless the whole intention was to make the video look like something other than a sniper attack.”
“So you’re thinking a sniper was stationed in that other building, knew what room these men would be in, sighted through the window, waited until one of them put on the vest, then shot it in the exact place to detonate it?”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound quite so plausible,” I admit.
“I’m not saying it isn’t plausible, just thinking aloud. Let’s suppose it actually went down like that. It would mean that all of our postulating about the entanglement research—”
“Was completely off base.”
“Yeah.”
Perspective.
You only find the truth when you look at the facts from the right perspective.
I try to evaluate things. “The sight line would’ve allowed the sniper to hit each of the men. Maybe the vest just played into the narrative better.”
“Like one of your tricks.”
“Like one of my tricks.”
“Is it definitive? Can you tell for sure if there’s a sniper over there?”
“No. But the curtains, the glint across the street, the fact that the guy didn’t reach up to detonate the vest himself — they all make it a legitimate possibility.”
“I’ll have a look at it as soon as I can with Fionna. She might be able to do something about the resolution. But it might be a little while. We’re almost to the cybersecurity office.”
“Good. As soon as you can.”
We end the call.
Reviewing the footage had only brought more questions — if there was a sniper, did that mean someone was faking the effects of this research? Could everything we’d been hypothesizing be on the wrong track entirely?
Hopefully, meeting with Dr. Colette would bring us some answers.
Because for the moment it felt like, as Fionna might say, someone had just knocked over another cage and there were even more gerbils than before underfoot.
The Need to Kill
The twins asked Riah to help them kill someone.
It was that simple. That’s why they’d called her in.
Given all that she knew, all that’d happened in the last couple days, the request wasn’t by any means out of the blue, but hearing Darren actually say the words, actually ask her to help eliminate a threat to national security, was instructive.
And inviting?
Yes, admittedly, it was.
Before letting them go on with their explanation, she returned to the topic of Goss and his family. “So you did that?”
“Yes,” Darren said.
“But how?”
“Something went wrong. We were trying to influence him to take his own life, but he did not. He slaughtered his family instead. With an axe. We weren’t able to—”
“Who did he kill first? The mother or the son?”
They stared at her. “I don’t know,” Daniel said.
I wonder what their wounds look like. How much blood there was.
“Why him? Why Adrian Goss?”
“He was the man who raped our mother.” Darren’s words were matter-of-fact. “The man who impregnated her.”
“Adrian Goss was your father.”
“Yes.”
A close personal connection.
The prerequisite for Tanbyrn’s research.
“Did you love him?”
Another quizzical look, but then both twins avowed that no, they had not loved him. Had not even known his identity until recently.
“We failed,” Daniel began. “We need you to—”
“Use the electrodes to stimulate the Wernicke’s area of your brains.”
“Yes.”
“To enhance your ability to cause discomfort in others.”
“Yes.”
Pain.
Death.
Exactly how all of this was possible was still unclear to her, but if Dr. Tanbyrn was right, the answer lay somewhere in the realm of quantum entanglement, an answer she would have to investigate more in-depth later when she had time.
“How did it feel?” she asked them. “To find out that a boy and a woman whom you had not targeted died in such a violent manner?”
“Disappointing,” Darren admitted. “It meant that on our own we weren’t as effective as we’d hoped.”
There was no remorse in his voice, not even a hint of sorrow over the loss of the two innocent lives.
She trusted the twins implicitly, knew that they were patriots, knew that they had only the best intentions in mind. And she trusted that they truly did need her help, that the next target truly was, as they said, a well-funded terrorist, an enemy of the state.
But could she help them kill?
She thought again of the fourteen-year-old girl in Afghanistan whose father had blown up, she thought of the son and wife of Adrian Goss, and she remembered being a teenager herself, holding that fragile-boned bird in her hands. Most of all, she remembered snapping its neck simply to see what it would be like to kill it. She knew that just like everyone, she had the capacity to kill. And to do so for no other reason than curiosity.
But could she kill a human being?
Yes.
Yes.
She absolutely could.
In an illuminating rush of insight, she realized that in a certain sense it was something she’d always wanted to do. Just like with the bird — to find out what it would be like. To find out if it would make her feel anything at all.
But there was one thing she needed to know before she would agree to help the twins. “People say that love lies at the core of human nature. To love and be loved. Do you believe that?”
“No,” Daniel told her.
“Then what do you think people want?”
“People don’t want to be loved; they want to feel loved.”
“To feel loved.”
“Yes. Would you rather be secretly despised by a partner, a lover, a spouse, but live your whole life believing that he deeply loves you, or would you rather be deeply loved by someone and yet never find out about it? Would you prefer a lifetime of feeling loved or a lifetime never finding out that you were?”
Riah wasn’t sure how most people would answer that question. She’d been told she was loved many times but had never known what it was like to feel it. Not for one minute of her life.
She took a moment before responding. “Don’t people want more than to simply believe they’re loved? Don’t they want the real thing — without any deception, without any betrayal? Don’t people fundamentally want both love and truth?”
“It’s very rare to have both,” Daniel said, not quite answering her question. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes. I would imagine that it is.”
Rare. Too rare in this world of so many people who were so soon going to die.
She realized that the feeling really must be what mattered most, and that given her nature, it was not something she would ever experience.