Zero Sum Game

Chapter 4

Shit shit shit shit shit!

I tore back along the street, my boots pounding against the asphalt, the math blurring and every other thought evaporating as I dove toward the car. I yanked open the door and ignored Courtney’s panicked questions as I wrenched the transmission into gear and spun us out into traffic with a squeal of tires; a cacophony of horns deafened us as other drivers swerved and slammed on their brakes, but I only heard Penny’s scream, echoing endlessly, high and terrified—we had to move—faster faster faster faster faster—

LA traffic is forever fucked, but it helps to know the calculus of moving objects—and to drive like a maniac. I slued between lanes, skidding in front of other cars by a hairsbreadth, cutting it as close as the numbers told me I possibly could, and when I started hitting traffic lights, I laid on the horn and popped the wheels up over the curb to sheer down the sidewalk, horrified pedestrians hurling themselves out of my way and traumatized citizens howling expletives in my wake. Courtney made small sounds in the passenger seat, bracing herself against the dashboard and trying to hang on.

This part of town didn’t have a huge police presence, but if I’d seen blue lights behind me I wouldn’t have cared. Or stopped. Within minutes, I was careening around the last corner toward Anton’s garage.

A tidal wave of heat and light and smoke crashed over the car, overloading every sense, blasting, overwhelming. We were still a block away, but I jammed my foot down on the brake, sending Courtney tumbling against the dash.

Anton’s building was a roaring inferno, the flames towering into the sky, black smoke pouring from the blaze and rolling thick and acrid over the street. I scrabbled at the door handle and stumbled out—the heat slammed into me even at this distance, an oppressive wall of blistering air. My skin burned as it flash-dried, and every breath scalded, as if I were swallowing gulps of boiling water.

The building was melting before my eyes, collapsing in on itself, the walls and roof folding with slow grace in massive flares of sparks. My brain catalogued materials, heat, speed of propagation…this horror had used chemical help; it must have. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope timing back in my mind, holding my breath and closing stinging eyes against the smoke that clogged the air.

I ran the numbers three different ways, and only succeeded in torturing myself. Even with the most generous estimates, nobody had made it out.

Fucking math.

I stumbled back to the car. The metal of the door was already warm. I slid into the driver’s seat, wrenched the steering wheel around into a U-turn, and accelerated back the way we had come. We’d ditch this car a block or two from here in case any traffic cameras had glimpsed my vehicular stunts, then put some distance behind us before the authorities arrived.

“Did they…are they…” Courtney asked timidly.

“Dead.” My eyes and throat scratched from the smoke.

A small sob escaped her. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” I couldn’t help wondering if it was her fault.

Or mine.

My mind buzzed. I’d contacted Anton a little over five hours ago—the traffic going into the city had held us up for a good chunk of time, but then I’d headed straight here. Five hours. Ample time to set this up, if someone had caught onto Anton’s search. If that someone happened to be motivated enough.

I tried to tell myself Anton’s work had encompassed a multitude of other projects, any of which might have generated enemies. Whoever had targeted him had overcompensated like fuck to take all of his data and information with him, but even so, a case from months or years ago might have provoked this. Some old client with a grudge. This didn’t have to be because of what I’d brought him.

Did I really believe that?

The platitudes curdled in my head.

Jesus Christ. This was supposed to be an easy job. Rescue the kid, get her out of the country, be home in time for dinner.

Nobody should have died on this one, least of all two people sitting at a computer looking things up for me.

My grip tightened on the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.

I studied Courtney out of the corner of my eye. She was hugging her knees to herself, her shoulders shaking, her ponytail falling across her and hiding her face.

She was involved in this somehow.

“What aren’t you telling me?” The words came out too harsh. I didn’t care. “Those men at your place were looking for something. What was it?”

She raised a blotchy, tear-streaked face to look at me. “I don’t—I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”

Right.

My client might be lying to me. My client, who was already on the run not only from the authorities, but from a drug cartel who wanted her dead, government men in dark suits, a dirty cop, and some unknown player willing to commit arson and murder to cover its tracks.

And, on top of everything, I’d lost my information broker. I tried not to think about Penny, the twelve-year-old kick-ass hacker who’d been taught to pay her taxes on time.

Courtney cried softly in the passenger seat the whole way to the bolt hole I drove us to. If she was playing a part, laying it on thick in the hopes I’d buy the tearful façade, she deserved some sort of acting award.

Maybe she really was just a naïve kid who had gotten in too deep, too scared or too stupid to tell me what was going on.

Still, the crying pissed me off. What right did she have to sob her eyes out for people she’d barely met and seemed to judge from moment one? “For Christ’s sake,” I growled, as I swung the car into a grimy alleyway. “You didn’t even know them.”

“How can you be so cold?” she murmured tremulously.

I slammed the car’s transmission into park. “Are you feeling guilty? Is that it?”

Tears swam in her red-rimmed eyes. “Guilty? Why would I—” Her face contorted in horror. Could someone really fake that? “This was about us? Oh, God—that was only this morning!”

Maybe I could turn her guilt to my advantage, I thought. Come at her from the side, maneuver her into revealing whatever she was hiding—

The thought was exhausting. I wasn’t any good with people, and I definitely wasn’t good at subtlety. I could threaten her, but…

Courtney rubbed the ends of her sleeves across her face, sniffling.

She was just a kid. Or near enough. Even I wasn’t willing to go there, at least not yet.

I picked up the file from Anton and the paper bag of money with stiff hands, and we got out of the car. The alleyway ended at a rusted back door; I led the way up a narrow, dark stairwell that climbed into a dilapidated second-floor loft. The furnishings were basic: mattress in the corner, some boxes with food and water in them, not much else.

I dug through one of the drawers in the kitchenette area where I remembered having thrown medical supplies and unearthed a bottle of expired sleeping pills, which I tossed at Courtney. “Here. Take those and get some rest.”

“I don’t like drugs,” she said unhappily.

I didn’t comment on the irony of that.

She swallowed the pills dry and stumbled over to the pallet in the corner. “Where are we?” she slurred, the drugs already kicking in.

“A safe place,” I said. “I have a few around the city. Keep them stocked, in case I need to lie low.”

She cocked her head at me for a long moment, smearing her sleeve across her face again, her eyes glazed. “You’re scary.”

Her frankness took me aback. “You hired me to get you out of all this, remember?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she mumbled. “I wish…” She was already starting to slump into a doze, her exhaustion combining with the pills.

“What do you wish?” Maybe, with her half-conscious state, I could get her to tell me something she otherwise wouldn’t have.

“I wish I didn’t need someone like you,” she said, and her eyes slid closed.

Yeah. Sure. I was the bad guy here.

I left my client a docile, snoozing form on the blankets, grateful for the respite. My stupid body was starting to feel the last thirty hours, but I rummaged through the drawers again and found a box of caffeine pills. I ached for a shower and a quick nap, but first I needed to see if I could put together what Anton had found—what he might have died for.

The file was thin. I pulled the lone stool in the flat up to the kitchenette counter and opened it, turning over the first few sheets of disconnected information and wondering how I would make sense of them, only to be hit in the face by a blandly unassuming document: a funding memo from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I sat and stared at it, feeling as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me.

Pithica was a project. Possibly a highly classified government project. I closed my eyes, trying to get a grip. It could be anything, I told myself. The United States has any number of operations the population doesn’t know about; it could be anything. Anything…

I saw lab coats and red tile in my mind’s eye. Whispers of weapons and a better future. I slammed down on the vision before my imagination ran away with me.

It could be anything.

There was a reason why I stayed off the government’s radar. Why I didn’t like the police, why I willfully ignored the law, why I didn’t have a Social Security card, why—unlike Anton—I refused to pay taxes, aside from the obvious. The government scared me. Too many secrets. Too many bits of darkness I’d seen hints of over the years.

People with that much power…too big. Too dangerous.

Too real.

What was I getting into?

I forced myself to keep looking through the other documents. The Senate memo only referenced the word “Pithica” incidentally, as if the mention had slipped in by accident, and included no details on the mission of the project or who might be running it. I rifled through the rest of the pages: a report of an investigation into California dock workers’ conditions, marked with a post-it that said it had come up in cross-referencing; a transcript from a radio transmission with half the text blacked out, giving no clear reference points; another memo with the phrase “Halberd and Pithica”—Halberd must be another project, but I found no other mentions of the word…

A few other documents turned up similarly frustrating bits and pieces. The file proved Pithica existed—or had existed; the most recent document dated from more than five years ago—but nothing more. Underneath the last page was a note in Anton’s blocky handwriting: “Should be more. Dead ends. Scrubbed? Will keep digging.”

The papers had no reference to Colombian drug cartels or anything else connected to Courtney Polk, and no hint of why the LAPD—or any other local police force, for that matter—would be looking into this.

I sat back. What did I know? The dirty cop chasing after us had expected me to have information on Pithica. He had followed us from the compound, which meant the cartel was involved somehow, and he had also said that if I didn’t talk, then he’d expected Courtney to be able to answer his questions.

Why? As far as the cartel’s chain of command went, Courtney Polk had been rock bottom. What did the cop think she knew? If this was about drugs, why had the cop come after her rather than anyone higher up?

And who were the people who’d been at Courtney’s house? The suits and the way they operated had screamed government-type, which fit with what Anton’s intelligence had revealed, but at least two of them had been European. What had they wanted from Courtney?

Every piece of this mess pointed back at my skinny twenty-three-year-old and her hard luck story. Either Courtney Polk had lied to me from the first moment I met her, or a whole slew of people, from the dirty cop to the Dark Suits, were mistaken about her importance.

And I knew someone who might be able to tell me which it was. Someone who could give me an idea whether I should be protecting my new charge or pulling a gun in her face and demanding answers. Someone who, if Courtney was more than the naïve kid she seemed, might have had ulterior motives about sending me on this mad chase in the first place.

I picked up the phone.

“I said don’t get involved,” said Rio flatly by way of greeting.

“Answer me one question.” I glanced over to the corner, where my would-be client was curled up into a ball and wheezing lightly in her sleep. “Did you have some other reason for sending me after Courtney Polk?”

Heavy silence deadened the line. Then Rio said, “Who?”