The Bright Spot Page 19

I tried to understand how a good student like Clinton felt about rumor and gossip without footnotes, but I was an actor and wasn’t so particular. “Listen to me. It’s a phony, all right, and her involvement’s no mere speculation. Question is, who’s doing the rumoring? Cover stories get to be rumors fast, helps spread them around. She’s the best they had, huh? If you ran special ops, and you wanted someone to steal the most valuable secret in the world, who would you use?”

  “The best I had.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. And she would be damn near irresistible—running the latest ’ware, willing to let Dumfries rewrite it, then report back to duty ... a mole made to order.”

  “Should we be talking about this over the phone?”

  “About Lenore? Sure. She’s been dead for forty years. Besides, as you say, it’s all speculation. More important, for the people listening on your phone to hear, is that I know what James Dumfries is up to in the here and now, so they better keep a sharp eye on me and keep me safe, because—and I’ll only say this once—I’m the only one who can stop him.”

  “Uh,” Clinton said.

  “Oh, I almost forgot, I had one more question. You said Dumfries favored more-localized control and the brass overruled him. How was that going to work?”

  Poor Clinton was still rattled at my willful indiscretion. “Uh ... Voice command, I think. Ordinary language.”

  “With some kind of password or access code?”

  “Or several. They could make it voice-print specific, for example, but the army said it could never be secure enough.”

  “They were afraid of mimics?”

  “No. That’s easily detectable. Good-enough recordings might not be. A captured commander might be compromised.”

  “What about twins?”

  “That might work, but that doesn’t sound very likely.”

  “Yeah. You have to work at it. And if this rumor was true and Lenore had herself infected with some virus to crash ’ware, how long would that take?”

  “All her ’ware would have to be redone, especially if she crashed and the old installation was corrupted. You have to do it step by step, in layers of code. A series of installations. Several weeks, I would think.”

  “Installation. They use suppositories for that, right?”

  “Usually.”

  “How fitting. Say hey to everybody at Murphy’s for us, Clinton. Thanks a lot.”

  I hung up, leaving him with a thousand questions, just what every bright kid needs. I bought a half-dozen buttermilk donuts, Lu’s favorite, as a peace offering.

  I didn’t plan on telling her I’d already broken my promise to be careful, but I had to make a move, at least act like I knew what I was doing, like I was solving the crimes, catching the bad guys. If I was good enough, I could even fool myself. That’s where all the best acting begins. Fool yourself, and the rest of the world’s a pushover.

  DRINKS ON TREY

  17

  Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

  How I wonder what you’re at!

  Up above the world you fly,

  Like a tea-tray in the sky.

  —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland

  THE NEW PLACE, THE PATRIOTEL, WAS LIVELIER than the Liberty. They had their own pancake house on the premises, doubling as a cocktail lounge at night. Nothing like a Black Russian and flapjacks to finish off the day. According to the sign out front, there was even a band. Los Refugios would be playing tonight well past my usual bedtime.

  Since Wally had all this outdoors to work with, he’d grown fond of sunrise shots. This morning’s sunrise, what seemed like days ago now, found me in the stocks, with the resourceful She-Creature picking the lock with her talons. I felt a good deal freer then. Good and stupid. We were on tap for another dawn shoot tomorrow, Wally informed me, on the island that once upon a time had been Jamestown and more recently had been another roadside attraction. I hoped to turn in early. It’d been a busy day.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Lu suggested if we were going to hang around and endanger our lives for a fucking show, maybe we should come clean with the others, in case they had more sense than I did. Since she put it so nicely, how could I disagree? It was one thing when we naively thought we’d given our pursuers the slip, but now that we knew we hadn’t, we had to let them know.

  After we moved, which took all of fifteen minutes, I called everybody. Gary, Wally, and Brenda were settled in for the night, so I arranged to meet them for an early breakfast, Wally’s favorite kind. Lu and I met Stan and Dee in the bar for a drink. Feeling homesick, I ordered an Icehouse.

  Maybe it was the big TV over the bar that had me thinking of Murphy’s. Only this one didn’t run movies. It was stuck on the news, and I made the mistake of sitting down facing it. Jury selection for the trial of the men accused of killing Edmund Kennemeyer had just gotten under way, and the hard-hitting, live, late-breaking newsies couldn’t get enough of it. Ed, to hear them tell it, had done nothing else in life but be queer; his killers, nothing else but hate queers. Ed’s murder was, they kept saying, “seemingly inevitable.” They didn’t even mention the ’ware controversy or run clips from Ed’s speeches. What did that have to do with anything? Instead they talked to the killers’ old schoolteachers, who thought they’d seen the early signs of hate and violence in their young charges, even though they were all basically good boys, and to Ed’s teachers, who confirmed he was a good boy too, even though he’d always been basically queer. The graphic was a body floating in bloody water. Pool of Hate, it said. I tried to ignore it. The truth was bad enough. Why did we have to be subjected to the news too?

  When they got around to Agent Limo at the bottom of the local news, he was a Colonial Williamsburg tourist—name withheld pending notification of relatives—who died of an apparent heart attack, the first such incident at CW—a perfectly safe tourist attraction—in a really, really, really long time. In an unrelated incident, a group of “elderly citizens” wandered away from their group and inadvertently raised a ruckus. There was footage of Gulliver racing around my geriatric abductors to great comic effect, and a newscaster yukking it up. Commercial: Virginia Is for Lovers! Jesus H. Christ.

  “Nick?” It was Lu, reeling me in. I was supposed to do the talking, fill Stan and Dee in. Tell them everything. We’d never shared Clinton’s little bombshell, never mentioned we were clones. We didn’t know how they’d feel about it. Hell, we didn’t know how we felt about it. Dee had a theory Trey was the root cause of anything gone wrong. As long as nothing was happening, that had been close enough. Now I was going to crank up their paranoia several notches. Just looking over your shoulder for the husband wouldn’t get the job done anymore.

  I put it all together as a narrative, starting with Lenore, then Galatea, and finally Luella. I filled in Ed, James, and Nicholas along the way, but I left out the Bright Spot. He’d just muddy the waters. Unlike Clinton, I wasn’t too particular about the footnotes. It went something like this:

  “Lenore Chapell was a soldier in special ops who crashed and burned on ’ware and joined the underground, or pretended to, eventually finding Ed, who hooked her up with Dumfries. He rewrote her as Galatea Ritsa, loading her with a virus to mess with ’ware when she reported back to duty. Jim and Galatea probably suspected they were being watched and pretended to be lovers to explain their clandestine meetings, or maybe they didn’t have to pretend. Either way, their tearful public breakup in the diner neatly served to activate the virus and explain her departure in one short scene.

  “But something went wrong, somebody was on to them, and Galatea was killed before she could deliver the virus. Nobody got what they wanted, least of all Dumfries. I still think his grief in the diner was genuine, that they became lovers for real. I guess in the end it doesn’t matter whether he loved her or not. She was dead, and their plan had failed.

  “But they had made backups, cloned embryos of them both—meaning they both must’ve been necessary to the process, and whatever they w
ere running was specific to their DNA—so it couldn’t be stolen or messed with. Our DNA now—me and Lu. Lu and I are the clones. Dumfries arranged for our births, set us up in life, but somewhere along the way the feds took over, and he got himself warehoused in an old folks’ prison. But the feds didn’t know what he intended to do with us and were aching to know in the worst way. For over forty years now. When Dumfries’ memory started failing, or he pretended it was, they sent in Salvador to pose as a shrink and see what he could get out of the failing old man.

  “My guess is Dumfries dreamed up the diner gag and persuaded Salvador it was his idea as a means of finding us and springing himself. He offered to cut Salvador in, and once he got loose, he killed him. He sent me looking for Kennemeyer, and the next thing you know he’s dead at the hands of a ’ware crew and ’ware workers are coming after me. I think Dumfries can tell any ’ware crew to do whatever he wants by voice command—including murder and kidnapping. This may be what the feds are after—the secret of how he does that.

  “He did it again tonight while I was walking Buck down at CW. A half-dozen old vets came after me. They killed an agent who’s been following us. One of the sweet old geezers snapped his neck. They wanted me intact, apparently, but once we drew a crowd, they shut down, and I took off.

  “Meanwhile, Dumfries is still on the loose, still hoping to put us to the use for which we’re intended, whatever it is. The only thing that’s stopping him, I figure, is that the feds haven’t given him room to maneuver. They’ve been watching all of us, Dumfries included, with tiny surveillance drones. Mr. Henry spotted them and zapped them temporarily. That’s why he asked us to leave. But I’m sure they’re up and running again. I don’t think I can elude them, so my best move is to stay put, out in the open.”

  “And the show can go on,” Lu added wryly.

  “And the show can go on,” I acknowledged. “We ... Lu thought I should tell you, give you the chance to decide for yourselves whether you want to stick around.”

  Dee and Stan traded a look. “We’re not going anywhere,” Stan said.

  “I don’t understand why Jimmy killed Ed,” Dee said. “Ed loved him.”

  “Somebody betrayed Jim and Galatea. That’s why Galatea died. I think Dumfries thought that somebody was Ed.”

  “If she was special ops, like you say,” Stan said, “I think she betrayed them herself. I know those guys. I don’t buy the lost-in-the-desert story. That was just to get her close to people in the underground. She was following orders from beginning to end—steal his secrets. If the thing in the diner was a code, she probably had his secrets already installed. He switched her on; next stop, debriefing and download. Doesn’t sound like he thought he was being played from the way he talked to you. Only somebody killed her.”

  “But why come after me?” Dee asked.

  “Because I told you the code without knowing it,” I said. “The names.”

  “That doesn’t seem like enough reason. Like I would know they were a code.”

  “Maybe he’s a nutcase,” Stan said. “Cloning himself and his lover—I mean, you gotta admit that’s pretty extreme. I was thinking, when you guys do the scene in the diner? Maybe it activated you guys too. Right? You must be running something. Just like they had to be running something.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Lu and I had worked our way through not having any parents, and now one of our progenitors betrayed the other? Perhaps was even programmed to betray the other? I liked them better as beleaguered freedom fighters with a tumultuous love life.

  Stan saw the look on our faces. “Wait a minute. You aren’t them. You shouldn’t think you’re the same people. Everybody’s got their own soul. You have free will.”

  I recalled Stan expressing vaguely religious sentiments on occasion. Apparently they weren’t so vague. “Along with genes, cops, spooks, and ’ware, we do indeed have free will, Stan. We’ll keep that in mind. Certain inalienable rights too. I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.” I looked under the salt shaker.

  “Aw, Nick.”

  “So who killed Galatea?” Lu asked. “Who would kill her? If she was a spook successfully completing her mission, the feds wouldn’t kill her, even if they doubted her loyalty—the ’ware, whatever it was, died with her. There’s no evidence Dumfries and Kennemeyer suspected her. Both sides wanted her alive.”

  “Can’t help you there,” Stan said. “You’re right. She’d only be valuable alive—to either side. Once she’s dead, the ’ware’s gone.”

  I could think of more than one person who might’ve taken aim at Galatea and a tree for reasons that had nothing to do with ’ware, but that was all speculation too. “Dumfries told me they planned to meet, but that it wouldn’t work out. He thought she was going to live. He wanted her to live....”

  “Oh shit,” Dee said.

  I followed her gaze over my shoulder. Trey Kennemeyer had just walked into the place—I recognized him from the news, where he showed up often. The waitress was pointing us out. He looked fifty, which meant he was probably older. He mugged importance in case anyone cared to recognize him. It made me wish I hadn’t.

  He walked up to the table, grinning like we’d all planned to meet here. He had a couple of goons with him, bulging with weapons under their nice suits. “Hello, Dee,” he said.

  “Hello, Trey,” she said icily. “How did you find me?”

  “You forget. The car is mine. I know where it is at all times. Everything that goes on inside of it as well.”

  Trey and Dee glared at each other for a moment, broadband malevolence—fifty-seven channels of fuck you. Stan and Dee liked to take long rides in the country in that car, alone, or so they’d thought. “You only think you know,” she said. “You don’t know anything about anything.”

  He didn’t argue the point. It was beneath him. He smiled past her at me and Lu and Stan. Nobody smiled back. “Introduce me to your friends,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting down. The goons remained standing, as goons will.

  “Lu, Nick, Stan,” Dee said. “This is Trey. We were all just leaving, Trey.”

  “No. Stay. I told the girl to come over. I’d like to buy everyone a drink. I could use one myself.”

  Drinks on Trey, just to show there were no hard feelings. How nice. I nodded my approval. I was part of the reason he wanted a drink, even though he seemed to have already had more than a couple. When he got a good look at me, his smooth had definitely hit a wrinkle, and I had a hunch I knew why. When the thirtyish “girl” came around, I ordered a single malt, a double, the best they had, with lots of ice. Stan and Dee abstained, of course, and Lu tried to, but I suggested sotto voce she order what I was having and pass hers to me. Trey liked my spirit and even though he had a substantial head start on the rest of us, ordered himself a double as well. The goons weren’t invited to partake. They had to remain alert to laugh at Trey’s jokes, smile at his wit, shoot his enemies.

  He must’ve thought this a good time to crawl out of whatever hole he’d been living in since his uncle’s lamentable death—to show the world he had nothing to hide, even if his queer uncle had gone and gotten himself killed. Now that he was back, he’d come to reclaim his wife and car, not necessarily in that order.

  When Trey and I had our Scotches, he made a little idle chatter about the virtual business, just to show he knew a thing or two. He had interests, he said. He told us what each one of them grossed last year. A real art lover. “I hope your little company will struggle along without Dee’s talents,” he said. He took a big gulp of his Scotch.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Dee said.

  He smirked. “Sure you are.”

  “No, Trey. I’ve left you. For good. I’m divorcing you.”

  He laughed loud and long, a bit of a ham. “Please. Don’t embarrass yourself, Dee. I don’t intend to finance this nonsense indefinitely. The car fees alone are more than you make. It’s gone far enough. You’ve had your fun. You’re my wife, and yo
u’re coming home. Let me remind you that divorce would mean you’d be cut off completely—that’s all the houses, the cars, everything. You signed a pre-nup, remember? You own zip.”

  Having seen one of his houses and too much of his art collection, I didn’t see where he got off getting so picky all of a sudden about the kind of nonsense he financed, but I kept my opinion to myself. Besides, she didn’t need his money. Dee was doing well enough, even on what ReCreation paid her, to live in a cheap motel with an ex-wrestler, if that’s what she wanted to do with her life.

  Trey was certain his single threat would do the trick, certain he knew how she was wired. She’d start bargaining for some little million-dollar shack somewhere and last year’s car. And once she did, she’d be acknowledging her life was on loan, and he was calling it in. She’d plead awhile. He’d stand firm. And then she’d walk out the door on his arm, just another repo, her big stud watching with his jaw hanging out. Trey downed the rest of his drink and set it on the table with a bang, so confident how the scene would play, he hadn’t left a single drop of single malt for another single take.

  “Fine,” she said calmly. “Go ahead. Keep your stuff. I don’t want it.” Stick that in your pre-nup.

  He snorted. “I’m not joking, Dee.”

  “And neither am I, Trey. And don’t embarrass yourself by asking me why. Come on, Stan.” She stood, and Stan stood beside her. The goons shifted to high alert, their hands inside their jackets, looking up at Stan, who wisely acted like Dee was doing just fine without his help.

  This wasn’t going quite as Trey had planned. Now she’d challenged him, openly mocked him, in front of all these loser friends of hers, with his goons right there, poised at the first opportunity to tell any and all how the boss’ wife had not only dumped him, but chopped it off right there in front of God and everybody, proving him to be the rich, dickless wonder they always figured him to be. He only had the one move. He had to say, “No, I insist, Dee. Tell me why. Enlighten us all.”

  Playing Princess Galatea hadn’t hurt Dee’s “feelings of empowerment” either. She took on a royal bearing and gave Trey a look like the pity of the executioner, and he must’ve known he was done for. Her rage was perfectly under control, like her breathing. A discipline. A practice. “Okay, Trey. You asked for it. I’ll enlighten you. If you’ve been watching me and Stan together, as I’m sure you have, then you must be completely blind to think there’s any way I would leave him for you—not for any amount of money or stuff. I’d have to be out of my fucking mind, wouldn’t you say? I mean—you’ve watched us more than once, right? Watched the recordings over and over? I know how you like to watch. Have you ever, in your whole life, ever seen a woman have a better time? Not me, I can tell you. You never saw me have a better time. And here’s the part you really won’t get—we love each other like crazy. We’re friends, you miserable prick. So go fuck yourself, Trey. You can use my big mirror.”