Seymour shakes his head. “No one could do that to themselves.”
“No normal human being could do that. But she did.”
“You keep saying these things as if they were facts. You don’t know.”
“I do, I saw her for what she was. At the end she didn’t even try to hide it. She was happy that I knew. Please, Seymour, I swear to you on Krishna’s name that she was gloating.”
Seymour stands silent for a minute, then takes the bottle of water from my hand and pours it over his head. He stares up at the burning blue sky. I have never sworn to him before. I’ve never had to. Certainly I have never invoked Krishna’s name before.
“I thought when we escaped IIC’s headquarters, we were safe,” he says miserably.
“So did I.”
“I thought you said the Telar were all destroyed.”
“I think they are.”
Seymour sighs and throws the empty bottle aside. “What a way to wake up,” he mutters.
“I’m sorry. Honestly, Seymour, the instant I killed her I thought of you. How much it would hurt you. It was all I could think about.”
Now he looks to me for comfort, and I’m amazed at his ability to forgive me, to trust me. “Did she suffer?” he asks quietly.
I think of the fires that await those who fail the test of the Scale, and how poorly Shanti will do when she reaches that judgment. But Seymour’s expression is so desperate, I believe a lie is better than the truth. Besides, I couldn’t have given Shanti a faster death than ripping off her head.
“It was quick,” I say.
We walk back to town. Seymour stops once to cry, but he is all right. I know eventually he will be fine.
THREE
Finally, the gang is gathered in Matt’s room. His air conditioner actually works. Cynthia Brutran sits at the head of his bed, an open laptop resting on her crossed legs, a pillow at her back. She has changed clothes since the start of our flight. Gone are her jewelry and expensive suits. Her pants look as if they were bought at the local drugstore—I suspect they were—and her top is a deceptive T-shirt with a sketch of Baker looking not only exotic but actually inviting beneath the rays of the setting sun.
Even though we are on the run, the woman—an old foe of mine—looks more relaxed than I have ever seen her. I wonder if the destruction of her company’s headquarters has given her a sense of freedom. I would not be surprised. Rather than your normal platoon of crooked tax accountants and boxes of records of phony stock options, the firm had demons in its basements.
Yet I am slow to trust Brutran.
She did try to kill me, a few times.
Her five-year-old daughter, Jolie, sits in a chair in the corner beside the TV, flipping channels between cartoons and the film Rosemary’s Baby. How appropriate, I think, since Jolie was the product of a breeding program designed to manufacture psychic mutants. The child also looks relaxed, happy even.
Seymour and I sit at the desk. Matt stays on his feet. He likes to pace when we have meetings, but not out of nervousness. I may have been the boss while we were trying to bring down the IIC and Telar, but Matt is our natural leader. The change in roles doesn’t make me feel threatened. I’m hoping I’ll find it a relief.
“Are we still on the list of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted?” Matt asks Brutran.
She nods. “We didn’t fall off during the night. The only difference now is that treason has been added to our list of crimes.”
“Terrorism and murder were not enough?” Seymour asks.
“Apparently not to whoever is after us,” Brutran replies.
“Do we know who that is yet?” Matt asks.
“Our capture is a priority for every law-enforcement branch of the government,” Brutran says. “That hasn’t happened since Bin Laden and his minions hit the World Trade Center.”
“Won’t someone high up the chain of command realize, soon, that these charges have been fabricated?” Seymour asks.
“They haven’t been fabricated, not entirely, and that’s the key to our dilemma,” Brutran says. “We did blow up IIC’s headquarters, and because the Pacific Coast Highway is loaded with remote cameras, chances are we were seen leaving the area immediately after the explosion. That building was full of children. Those children were incinerated in the blast. The police and fire departments are still trying to dig what is left of their bodies out of the rubble. That footage is running almost continuously on CNN and a dozen other news stations, and it’s creating a national anger, a raging wave. The American people want the perpetrators caught. They want them tried and punished. Imagine the pressure that rage puts on the politicians, on the police, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA.”
“But why have they latched onto us as the guilty parties?” Seymour asks. “So we were in a van leaving the area. Lots of vehicles were leaving the area.”
“Good question. It leads me to my second point,” Brutran says. “In the midst of this mass hysteria, pictures of us in the van are suddenly sent to every law enforcement agency in the government. A fake history of us is created. I just read an in-house email that is being circulated at the FBI that states that Sita—whom they are calling Alisa Perne—spent five years in Syria in a terrorist camp, where she learned the art of bomb making. All of us are being assigned similar pasts, and this information is being widely circulated by the program the Cradle created and placed on the Internet.”
“But this is insane,” Seymour protests. “Can’t these agencies tell fake information from the real thing?”
“Yes and no,” Brutran says. “To understand the no part, you have to understand the fierce competition that exists between the various agencies. The disputes between the police and the FBI are legendary. There have been hundreds if not thousands of TV shows and movies that have talked about that. The local police are working on a case and an FBI agent shows up and all hell breaks loose. That’s old news. But when Homeland Security was created, the discord was taken to a new level. Homeland feels they are the boss, that all the other agencies should bow to them. While the CIA has been around for ages, and they feel they are the final authority. My point is that these agencies don’t cooperate with each other, not easily. They are loath to share information, and when they do, they seldom trust that the information they’re getting from another agency is accurate.”