Empire Games Series, Book 1(16)
AGENT GOMEZ: Hell, it’s the sort of thing they do. We just stole a leaf from their playbook. If they’d identified her themselves they’d probably have done it for us—
COL. SMITH: Don’t interrupt. Your concerns are noted and will be taken into account. Let me remind everyone who we’re dealing with here: Miriam Beckstein’s daughter.
AGENT O’NEILL: Who was raised by total strangers, is an inactive carrier of the world-walking trait, and who is a Generation Z underachiever who works as a booth babe at trade shows.
COL. SMITH: But who, despite being tased and shoved in a trunk, correctly evaluated her situation and turned the tables on her kidnappers. She did serious physical damage to one of them: subdural hematoma and major abdominal bruising. His condition is listed as critical by Mass General, by the way.
DR. SCRANTON: Where did she get the blackjack?
AGENT GOMEZ: It wasn’t a blackjack, it was a tire iron. And she had it in her car trunk. Under the carpet, where the muscle didn’t spot it.
DR. SCRANTON: Lovely. Do please continue, Colonel.
COL. SMITH: She called the cops. Why did it get through? I thought we had a divert on her phone?
AGENT O’NEILL: We did indeed have a divert: it didn’t work. Turns out the hired goons took her handbag and phone off her—they weren’t idiots, and somebody forgot to hand them that part of the script. Turns out she had a survival kit in the trunk—blankets, first aid kit, tire iron, and a prepaid phone for emergencies—and nobody thought to search her car before she got to it, so we never found it.
AGENT GOMEZ: If we’re parceling out the blame, I’d just like to note …
DR. SCRANTON: Don’t bother. I’m not going to let this turn into a scapegoating exercise. Just stick to the story so that I know what I’m covering for.
AGENT O’NEILL: She took down one goon and ran for it. Then because she got through to the real 911 service, the state police dogpiled the scene. Which made goon two lose his shit and light up one of their drones. And it all went downhill from there.
DR. SCRANTON: So we can point to the goon going off-script by taking her bag, and her unusual degree of preparedness in having an emergency kit in her trunk. So my next question is, did she swallow the narrative? Have we spoiled her by accident? It’d be a real shame if all this mess was for nothing.
COL. SMITH: That’s a good question. I don’t think we’re going to learn the answer to it until I’ve had a chance to talk to her myself, tomor—later today.
AGENT O’NEILL: I make it 50/50. If she buys it, we might be able to recover and acquire a useful asset; I mean, she showed initiative and courage under pressure—that’s got to be a plus. But if she doesn’t buy the scenario …
DR. SCRANTON: We’ll worry about how deep to bury her if and when that eventuates. Hopefully it won’t. Meanwhile, I call this a wrap. Let’s go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I’ll brief the folks upstairs. In the meantime, when Rita’s had a bit of time to think about things Sonia and Patrick can take her in and Eric can pitch her the offer. We’ll take it from there.
END TRANSCRIPT
BOSTON, MARCH 2020
The helicopter spirited her away into night and mist. After a flight lasting less than thirty minutes, it landed in a distant corner of an airfield where the gray shadows of military transport aircraft lined the runway. Jack led her to a van with blacked-out windows, and it took them to a hangar. Then he led her inside, to a corner where a stack of modular prefab offices formed a multistory complex, completely invisible to the outside world. One of these was tricked out with another bland motel-style room with no windows and no handle on the inside of the door. Rita was unsure whether or not to feel grateful for the locks and the dog-sized six-legged robots with grenade launchers patrolling the darkness outside. She was beginning to suspect that perhaps the only foolproof way to tell the difference between a fortress and a jail was by the attitude of the guards to the inmates.
She held herself together while she showered and unpacked enough of her personal effects to pretend that this room was yet another hotel suite rather than a fancy prison. But then the day’s events hit home. Curling up beneath the comforter, she clutched her phone, her traitorous link to the world, and hit up the local news sites, mindful that everything she surfed would be as transparent as glass to her custodians. There was, she discovered, absolutely no word of a lethal shoot-out near the interstate south of Boston. Nothing. She hadn’t been expecting to be the talk of the town, but the totality of the media blackout was chilling. Everybody understood that this sort of thing happened, that the First Amendment had to take a backseat to the requirements of national security from time to time. But witnessing the thoroughness with which everything from street cams through Twitter feeds fell silent before the demands of the Dark State gave her an eerie sense of detachment. It was as if she was coming adrift from her life, and all that was solid was melting into air. She began to shake; then the tears came.
Catharsis and sleep brought her to a better place by the time she woke early the next morning. The lack of manacles and orange jumpsuits was a positive sign. Her absent relatives might be enemies of the state, but the state had decided that she was not one of them. She forced herself to message her parents, flatmates, and a handful of friends, telling them she’d been delayed out west but was okay. She kept it to the sort of content-free fluff that would tell a censor nothing about her, and that might even be viewed as evidence of cooperation.