Zero Sum Game

Chapter 22

I had to move fast.

The location Checker had sent was out past Edwards Air Force Base, way out in the desert north of Mojave. Not much out there, I thought—nothing but rocks and dunes and endless sky. Good place for an ambush.

The car with my Ruger and grenades under it had probably been driven off by now. I’d grab Checker’s help to track it down later, if I lived that long. I was still near enough to the Chinatown apartment to swing by; all I had left there were the crap guns from the day before and a knife, but that was better than nothing. I armed myself in less than five minutes, grabbed a few protein bars and a light jacket from the meager tangle of clothes I had there, and headed northeast in a stolen sports car.

I called Rio from the road and hit a voicemail box. I gave him all the details, then hesitated, wondering if I should apologize for breaking my word to stay off the case. After all, I had told him I would keep my head down right before doing a spectacular job of exactly the opposite.

“I’ve got to go in,” I finally said to the recording. “I, uh—I hope that doesn’t interfere with any of your plans or anything.” I didn’t have a choice, though. Stupid Arthur Tresting had forced all of our hands.

I went well above the speed limit the whole way, but it was still almost three hours before the GPS in the sports car told me I was nearing the coordinates Checker had sent. The location was off any roads, but I circled around and barely made out the outlines of an unmarked half-paved track leading into the desert. I paused the car, switching off the headlights and letting my eyes adjust to the dimness.

Cell service had dropped out miles before. I was alone out here, driving into what was almost certainly an ambush. Shit. I might pack a whole lot more punch than Pithica was expecting, but if they sprung a trap before I saw it, I’d be just as dead as someone who didn’t know any math.

As long as I had an instant to react, however, I’d have the edge. And Tresting didn’t have a chance without me, I reminded myself. I took a deep breath, every sense alert, and nosed the car forward down the makeshift road.

The GPS said I was still a few miles away. The car crunched over the rocky ground, the empty night rolling by quietly to either side. Before long a handful of buildings rose ahead, a ghost town looming out of the desert: a couple of boarded-up businesses, a graffitied gas station, a string of warehouses that had probably encouraged the town to grow here in the first place. Darkness cloaked all the buildings, and they sat heavy with the stillness of the long-since abandoned.

I let the sports car roll to a stop and watched from a distance. Nothing moved. The moon lent its gray light to the emptiness, but only showed each hulking, shadowed building as darker and more vacant than the next. I sat for a moment, measuring out likely places for danger to come from, extrapolating probable threats. Snipers? Possible, though they didn’t have many vantage points here; the lines of sight danced through my senses and crossed at poor angles. Mines in the road, as the motorcycle gang had tried? A bomb that would obliterate the entire town, one already set to detonate, one I would never even see before it went off?

That was all more dramatic than Pithica’s preferred MO, though. Maybe they wouldn’t care how they took me out; after all, I lived off the grid anyway, and no one would miss me. But wouldn’t they want a better explanation for Arthur’s demise? How much would they care about disguising it?

I wasn’t keen to find out. My current objective was to find Tresting and leave. We could return with a much better plan than sneaking in haphazardly and separately in the dark.

I goosed the sports car forward, the tires crunching on gravelly asphalt. As I came to the outskirts of the town, a familiar shape rose out of the darkness and distinguished itself: Tresting’s truck.

I stopped the car and slid out, drawing the Smith & Wesson. I reached out my other hand to press against Tresting’s hood. The engine was cold. He’d been here for a while already.

A slight scuff in the dirt. I spun and dove to the side in a crouch, bringing up the Smith—

I recognized the silhouette and let my finger up off the trigger. “Tresting. Shit.”

He lowered his weapon at the same time I did. “Russell? What you doing here?”

“Backing you up.” I straightened, staying wary. “Checker called me in.”

He sucked in a breath. “Course he did.”

“What’s the situation?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the darkened buildings.

He turned back toward the town. “Ain’t rightly sure. Nothing here.”

My spine prickled. “What do you mean, nothing?”

“Been through the place three times,” Tresting said. “Was real leery of surprises the first time through, but…nothing.”

That didn’t make any sense. “What about the tracker?”

“Ain’t found it yet. Looks to be in the second warehouse there—” He nodded toward the hulking buildings. “—but the signal ain’t precise enough for me to pinpoint. Searched the place top to bottom, and can’t find anything.”

“Show me,” I said.

I let Tresting take point, trailing him to the warehouse. I kept my gun drawn, my senses wired, but the street stayed empty.

Tresting led the way inside, prying up a metal roll-up door with a loud screech of steel. I glanced around sharply, but our surroundings didn’t give a twitch in response.

I ducked into the warehouse, my eyes straining against the leaden darkness inside. A few grimy skylights let in scant moonlight, but didn’t provide any more contrast than outlines of gray on gray. Someone had tried to refurbish the inside of the warehouse, badly, and had never finished—flimsy walls attempted to partition the vast floor space and formed a maze of unceilinged half-rooms, as if a giant had approximated an office cubicle jungle with cheap sheetrock.

“Could be anywhere,” said Tresting softly, his voice echoing. “Might be hopeless.”

“I think we can narrow it down,” I said. I’d taken great care to pay attention to the coordinates Checker had given me, and to what the GPS had read when I stopped the car. I did a quick extrapolation in my head given the precision of the tracker—it had to be the northeast corner. “This way,” I murmured, heading in that direction.

Tresting seemed as nervous as I was, even after having searched the whole place already. This time he hung back while I led, watching our six in a semicircle as I found a way through the wide aisles between the drywall.

“It has to be somewhere past here,” I said, and then realized I didn’t hear Tresting’s footsteps behind me anymore.

I slipped to the side and whipped around, gun barrel first.

Tresting had disappeared. Instead, a slender silhouette was stepping out of one of the unfinished rooms and raising delicate hands in the air.

Everything went cold. Even in the darkness I recognized Dawna Polk.

“Hello, Ms. Russell,” she said. “My people have Mr. Tresting. Please put down your weapon, or unfortunately he will be the one to suffer for it.”

He said he searched the building. He said he searched the building! Where had they been hiding? And why?

“You have questions,” acknowledged Dawna. “The reason we did not show ourselves before now was that we were waiting for you.”

How could they possibly know I would show up?

“We made some educated guesses about human nature,” she answered with a small smile. “We’re quite good at that.”

But what did they want with me in the first place? And why not just kill us?

“I shall explain everything in good time,” said Dawna. “But you are quite correct; we do wish you to accompany us whole and unharmed for the moment. Your new friend Mr. Tresting is more expendable, so please, put your weapons on the floor.”

Jesus Christ. She was reading my mind.

And to make everything orders of magnitude worse, they’d grabbed Arthur so quickly and quietly I hadn’t heard a whisper of it. Some serious muscle must be lurking in the shadows—I’d fought alongside Tresting; he was no slouch.

And now Pithica had him.

I lowered the Smith & Wesson slowly and placed it on the cement floor, keeping my hands away from my body as I stood back up, wondering just how far Dawna Polk’s powers went.

“Really, Ms. Russell?” said Dawna, a hint of humor in her voice.

“It was worth a try,” I said aloud, and reached around to untuck the Glock and the TEC-9 from my belt and leave them on the ground, too.

“Everything,” said Dawna. “I must say, it’s almost as if you doubt me.”

I slid the knife out of my boot and left it with the firearms.

Dawna lowered her hands. “That’s better,” she declared, and I felt a sharp pang of frustration. Rio had warned me, but something in me had hoped his stark description an exaggeration. Mind reading had seemed too absurd, too unbelievable. But here was Dawna Polk, able to see exactly what I was thinking as if she’d cracked open my skull, to look at me and know—

“Yes, I do,” Dawna said briskly. “Now, we do know you can be…an effective person, even unarmed. Please believe Mr. Tresting will continue to be a hostage to your good behavior.” She raised her voice slightly. “Take her, please.”

More shadows glided out of the surrounding rooms, black-clad bodies punctuated with the distinctive hard angles of the well-armed. If I had been here alone, I might have looked for a way out, even with Dawna reading me—might have tried to get away even if the mathematical expectation read death. But if I made a move…goddamn Arthur. I shut my mind away from calculating escape routes and let gloved hands pull my wrists behind me; the plastic bite of a ziptie cut into my skin.

This was why I should never care about another person’s welfare, I thought.

“Oh, Ms. Russell. Caring about others is what makes life worth living,” Dawna chastised me.

I squinted at her. I might not be psychic, but I couldn’t hear any irony in her words. She seemed to believe that.

“I do,” she said. “Now, I apologize for the less than ideal treatment you are about to receive. But you and I have a lot we must talk about.”

She nodded to her people, and I felt a gentle shove of a strong hand on my shoulder. I took the cue and walked out among the press of heavily armed bodies, out into the night and into the back of a white van that had materialized from nowhere.

As the van rumbled to life and rolled away from the ghost town, I tried not to think about what Dawna had said. She wanted to talk to me.

She wanted to talk to me.

My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t get enough air.

Dawna Polk wanted to talk to me.

Raw terror began crackling around the edges of my thoughts.

Calm down, I ordered myself. Think. Strategize. Dawna wasn’t here now, only her faceless black-clad people who surrounded me silently, armed with M4s in their hands and sidearms on their thighs, and their well-armed discipline was trivial. Eight people became nothing when I had mathematics on my side. But the sure knowledge that Tresting was in a similar windowless van surrounded by equally armed guerillas stayed me; Dawna had told me she would kill him if I didn’t cooperate, and I believed her.

I needed a way out for both of us.

But if I couldn’t find one, how long would it take Dawna to turn me inside out, to destroy everything I was and replace it with whatever personality she chose? How long before she scraped my brain free of any errant opinion, made me a parrot for Pithica’s goals? If her earlier influence was any indication, I wouldn’t even notice it happening. I would become a puppet who blithely continued to think herself a real human being.

Panic rose, flooding my brain with static, crowding out any attempts to plan. A new and unfamiliar emotion dragged at me—helplessness.

I had never been helpless. I’d never faced any threat I hadn’t been confident of overcoming eventually, not with my mathematical abilities—

My abilities. Did Dawna know what I could do? If she didn’t, if I managed to hide it, I might have just the edge Arthur and I needed to escape. Did I have the slightest chance of it? Had I already given myself away?

Dawna could read any thought off my face; I had no hope of masking any information she might seek from me. But she wasn’t seeing every last bit of knowledge in my brain, was she? Surely that would be impossible. If she knew every last fact in everyone’s head at every moment, the deluge of information would overload her. Might I potentially be able to shield something from her, something like my math prowess, if I simply didn’t think about it?

Yes, because it always works to try not to think about something!

I squashed back the panic and racked my brain for ideas. If Dawna asked whether I was a superpowered math genius who could make like a one-woman army, a twitch of my eye would tell her yes, but unless she already suspected as much, she would have no reason to ask, would she? The question would be so far outside her fundamental assumptions; it would never occur to her unless I gave myself away. I couldn’t turn off seeing the numbers, but if I refrained from calculation as much as I could, would it be possible? Mathematical connections made themselves apparent to me all the time. Letting that sense lie latent would be as insurmountable as turning off my hearing—or, more accurately, trying to ignore everything I heard. Could I damp it down enough to hide it?

Wait. What if I did the opposite? Dawna likely didn’t know a great deal of mathematics; she wouldn’t be able to tell the extent of my abilities unless I connected them to reality. If I focused inward instead—well, not thinking of something might be almost impossible, but thinking of something was a much easier strategy, and focusing on innocuous trivialities might crowd out every thought I didn’t want to have. Messy computation would provide the perfect static, which meant I didn’t have to bind back my mathematical capability—I would instead hide it in plain sight.

Not to mention that if I provided enough white noise in my brain, I might not only have a chance at camouflaging my math skills, but potentially keep other stray thoughts from surfacing, as well. If Dawna asked what I was trying to hide, the answer would truthfully be as much as I possibly can.

She might see through the guise right away, of course. But at least now I had something to try.

Over an hour later, when the van pulled to a stop after rolling downward for several long minutes into what felt like an underground parking structure, I’d filled my brain with unending computations of the nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann-Zeta function. If that ceased to occupy my full concentration, I threw in constructing a succinct circuit and calculated a Hamiltonian path in it at the same time, and also tried to keep up a run factoring a string of two and three hundred-digit numbers, one after the other. It was math—but it was normal, uninteresting math, heavy computations I hoped would weary Dawna with their tedium the moment she saw them, dry manipulations of numbers that would frustrate her as an obvious strategy to hide something else.

Most people’s eyes glazed over the instant equations came on the scene. I hoped Dawna Polk would be no different.