Empire Games Series, Book 1(10)
DR. SCRANTON: She doesn’t even know who the fuck Miriam Beckstein is. What are you going to do, reel her in and give her a background briefing first?
AGENT GOMEZ: Why don’t we do just that? Crazier shit has worked.
DR. SCRANTON: Colonel, how about it? What do you think?
END TRANSCRIPT
SEATTLE, MARCH 2020
Jack looked sympathetic but continued implacably: “Back in 1992, two medical students met at Harvard and did what happens when two bright, not terribly worldly students strike sparks. He was a high-flying scholarship boy, the son of first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. She was adopted, like you: her parents were a lapsed Jewish political bookstore owner with a discreet trust fund and his left-wing activist wife. Anyway, our two students moved in together, and one thing led to another and they had a little accident with a burst condom which blew out the third year of her degree. He continued in medicine: she took six months out and transferred sideways, picking up credits in journalism after the adoption. They got hitched six months before he graduated, but separated eight months later and then divorced. It was a patch-it-up marriage, and it didn’t work out.”
Jack stopped reading from his tablet. Why are you telling me this? Rita wanted to scream. I don’t know these people! I don’t want to know them! But her lips felt numb, her tongue frozen. Gomez drained her cup of Dr Pepper and took up the thread.
“The father went on to a career in clinical oncology and moved to North Carolina. He remarried: you have a half-brother and two sisters. The mother—”
“I don’t want to know this!” The pressure valve had blown: Rita’s voice broke as she raised it, ragged and angry.
“Yes you do.” Gomez stared coldly at Rita. “The woman I’m telling you about pursued a career in investigative journalism in Boston for some years before dropping off the radar in 2002. Subsequently she became a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into world-walkers. And yes, they are real. She and her adoptive mother—the father died in 1993—disappeared for good shortly before 7/16, but not before we confirmed that they were both world-walkers.”
“What? The fuck?” The half-eaten burrito in Rita’s stomach seemed suddenly to have turned to lead. “You’re telling me I’m related to time travelers? The ones who nuked the White House?”
Gomez glanced at Jack, who took over: “They’re not time travelers, exactly. And you are not under suspicion of having nuked the White House,” he added, deadpan. “For one thing, you were eight years old. You also have a rock-solid alibi provided by your third-grade teacher, Mrs. Chu.” Rita stared at his hands. It seemed like a safe thing to do. He wore a signet ring, embossed with the initials CTR. She noticed him glance at Gomez. They’re tag-teaming me, she realized sickly. She’d seen enough TV shows and movies to recognize the good cop / bad cop dynamic. Keep the subject off-balance.
Gomez took over after a brief delay: “This is where it gets sticky. Please hand over your phone.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I say so!” Gomez snapped. For a moment Rita saw something unnerving and hateful in the other woman’s eyes, something that gave her unpleasant schoolyard flashbacks. She fumbled to comply.
“We’re going to reflash the firmware,” Jack explained. “You won’t notice anything different, but if you dial 911, we’ll hear you. If you’re calling for fire or ambulance there won’t be any delay. But if you need, uh, help, we’ll be in the loop along with the local police. Again, if it’s routine, we’ll stand back. But if you need us, our department, we’ll be there.”
Rita released her phone with nerveless fingers. They’re going to root it, she realized. No federal override icon: they were turning her phone into a full-time informer. Was there anything incriminating in there? Questionable photos? Sexts? Oddly phrased e-mails or text messages? It probably didn’t matter: they could already grab anything they wanted off the net without her permission. The old-time secret police relied on informers; the modern ones just conscripted your phone. She felt sick to her stomach. “Why are you doing this?” she asked again.
Gomez gave her a tight-lipped stare. “You’re not cleared. So we can’t tell you,” she explained. “It might be a false alarm. So, there might be no reason at all why we’re having this meeting. Or it might be the most important meeting in your life, the one that saves you.”
“What?” Rita’s head spun. “You think—your bosses think—my genetic relatives might suddenly take an interest in me after a quarter of a century of neglect? Why is that?”
“They’re world-walkers,” Jack said as dismissively as he might have written off any other group of terrorists. “Who knows why world-walkers do what they do?”
“But I’m not a world-walker!” Rita quavered. She watched as Gomez pulled the back off her phone, plugged some kind of chip into it, and Vulcan nerve-pinched it into a reboot chime. The half-eaten burrito lay on the table in front of her, cooling. She didn’t feel hungry anymore. She felt nauseous, bloated by a decades-long festering sense of emptiness and injustice. “I’m not a world-walker.”
Jack shrugged again, an I-feel-as-uncomfortable-as-you-do gesture that fell flat. “We’re not saying you are.”