“Memes as in the cultural equivalent of genes? Sure. Although I thought you said that conscience was a product of biological evolution, not culture.”
“The existence of conscience, yes. It’s the details that are the social construct. Memes are what’s passed on from generation to generation. Some details survive, others are weeded out. That’s what culture is.”
“So, are you saying that we’re all slaves to memes? That my actions are somehow controlled by them?”
“Not exactly. There are some people who might like to think of genes and memes as things that control our actions, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. Memes don’t control us. Rather, they’re parasites, riding the coattails of human thought. Humans think, make decisions, and memes piggyback on these decisions to spread from person to person. Genes and memes are not get-out-of-jail-free cards. We might inherit hereditary characteristics or be influenced by memes, but we can never entirely give them credit for our consciences or pin the blame on them for our sins.”
“Okay, so let’s say I had a gene in me that, I don’t know, made me inclined to rape women,” I said. “If I then decided to rape you senseless, that’s not the fault of my genes? Or what about if I’d been horrifically abused as a child and as a result never developed a moral compass that told me that love and kindness are good things, and I turned out to be a serial killer. Would that not be down to my environment and upbringing?”
“I don’t believe that,” Lucia said. “People always have a choice. Regardless of what’s come before. People are free, which means that people can choose to throw away that freedom. People are free precisely because they have the choice to decide for themselves what they’re free not to do, for their own sake or for the sake of someone else.”
I looked once more at Lucia’s face. Suddenly, I felt free. Pardoned. Not because I’d received affirmation that what I had done was right. Not because my sins had been forgiven.
All that had happened was that Lucia had shown me how my sin was my own. It was my cross to bear, not something that had been thrust on me by anyone else.
“Thank you,” I said.
Lucia accepted my gratitude in silence.
Although there were checkpoints all over town and a person’s progress through them could easily be monitored, crime had not completely disappeared. The surveillance society we now lived in was a great deterrent against systematic or premeditated crimes because the perpetrators knew they were almost certainly going to be tracked down, caught, and punished. But the flip side of this was that the surveillance state was almost useless at stopping impulsive, desperate, or suicidal crimes where the perpetrator was fully prepared for capture—or too far gone to care if they got caught. As such, the tradition of seeing a lady safely home to her front door at the end of an evening had not gone entirely out of fashion.
We took the metro and then a streetcar. I’d only had a couple of beers, so I wasn’t really under the influence, so to speak. I was certainly alert enough to sense that we were being watched from the moment we alighted at the streetcar stop closest to Lucia’s apartment.
What to do? If this was just an ordinary tail, I’d have no problem seeing Lucia safely home and then dealing with it afterward. But if it consisted of associates of the kid I’d beaten up last time, well, they wouldn’t fall into the same trap so easily.
I couldn’t discount the possibility of an attack. In fact, given how bold they were being—barely keeping any distance at all—it was more than a possibility. It was a good fifteen minutes’ walk along quiet side streets to Lucia’s place. Our base was directly opposite her apartment, of course, so that was hardly a better option to aim for at this juncture. I sent a distress call to Williams. If he managed to reach us in time we’d be able to find a way out of this.
I grabbed hold of Lucia’s hand and started picking up the pace.
My gut feeling had been correct. Our tail sped up, barely even bothering to keep hidden anymore. Not even the most amateurish pursuers would come out in the open like this unless they meant business. I resigned myself to the fact that we would be attacked somewhere between here and Lucia’s place.
I wasn’t sure exactly how many of them there were yet, but I could be pretty sure that, given what I did last time, there’d be more than one of them.
I was in a bind. If the chips were down I’d be forced to draw my gun, and at that instant my cover with Lucia would be blown, and all my effort so far would be in vain. Well, unless Lucia had any other advertising executive friends who enjoyed publicly brandishing handguns on their days off.
The problem was, then, one of timing. I didn’t want to draw too soon, or indeed at all, if possible—my gun was my ace in my sleeve. If the other side had no such qualms, though, I’d be at a distinct disadvantage when it came to showtime.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Bishop? Why have we sped up all of a sudden?” Lucia asked, her voice clearly troubled. I ignored her and pulled her along. Hoping, praying for some passersby that would make it harder for us to be assaulted openly.
A man appeared ahead of us. One of the young men from the other day. I charged straight on toward him without letting up in pace. At the same time the figure tailing us from behind broke into a dash—
—but had mistimed his run—
—and I reached the man in front of me faster than he had expected and gripped his gun slide tightly as he tried to pull his gun from his jacket pocket. The gun was immobilized, and the man couldn’t pull the trigger. I wrenched it from his grasp in a fluid circular movement, snapping his finger that I’d trapped in the trigger.
The man screamed in pain and fell to the stone paving. I spun around, pointed the gun I had just snatched, and fired at our assailant coming at us from behind.
Then a surprise—the gun was ID-registered.
The grip rejected my fingerprints and the gun went into safety lockdown. So maybe these bozos were foreign intelligence agents after all?
I gritted my teeth and chucked the gun away.
All this happened in a flash—Lucia was still standing where I had left her.
I scanned the area quickly but could see only the man approaching from behind. But I couldn’t believe there were only two of them. I had to be on the lookout for an ambush.
So far I had avoided drawing my gun. At this rate, I might still be able to explain away my actions and my skill without blowing my cover. A stint in the army during my youth or something. I was still in control. At least, that’s what I thought until the man behind us caught up to us.
Then I was no longer in control.
Fire.
Indexfingermiddlefingerringfingerlittlefingerthumb.
Electric shock.
My senses were blown away in a blast of thunder.
My fingertips, my toes, my eyes, all throughout my body—an unbelievable, searing hot pain. All the extremities of my body were on fire, as if they’d all decided to go insane at the same moment. I almost blacked out from sheer agony.
“Mr. Bishop? What’s the matter? Charles? Charles?”
This was what it must have felt like to burn up from the inside out.
Lucia had a look of panic on her face. She placed a hand on my shoulder. I realized the man approaching us from behind was no longer running. He had his mobile device pointed at me and was strolling gently in my direction.
“Run away.” The pain in my extremities was so severe it took me a few seconds to squeeze the words out. “Lucia, run.” The man kept on walking toward us. I realized it was the scruffy young man I had beaten up in the alleyway.
Perhaps the pain I was feeling numbed my sense of time, but it seemed to me to take an eternity before Lucia finally took heed of my words and turned to run away. The pain in my legs grew too much to bear, and I collapsed prostrate onto the historic cobblestones of old Prague.
I screamed wordlessly, acknowledging my total and utter defeat.
“There’s no need for you to run away, Lucia.”
I could just about make out the voice. Through the pain that was forcing my body apart, through my seeping consciousness, I turned toward the speaker to see his face.
A face I had seen numerous times in various pre-mission briefings.
The face of the man who had eluded us all these years.
Lucia was rooted to the spot, staring at John Paul.
✦ ✦ ✦
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