He had a point. Outside my work, all I knew of the world came from clips on CNN. I lived in a Domino’s Pizza world. I lived in a world of fifteen-minute chunks of free movie previews.
“Basically, the issue we have is that the idea that submitting ourselves to permanent surveillance somehow makes us safer is one great lie. An unfair trade. The reason we choose to live anonymously is because we don’t want to live in a society that forces this trade upon us.”
Lucius stepped away from the abyss surrounding us. He sighed, then continued. “John noticed that the CIA were staking out Lucia’s apartment. He warned us of this fact—he’s a good customer. We figured that you might be using Lucia to get to us. You’d already roughed up one of us, after all.”
One of the men took out a mobile terminal and tapped the keypad.
The tips of my body were flooded with that searing pain again, and I yelled and collapsed.
“Stop it, please! You’re killing him! Please!” Lucia screamed.
Lucius glanced at the man who was frying me. The man was, of course, the youth that I had worked over in the alleyway. His face was still covered with bruises. He slowly put away the Mob in his back pocket.
“A Paingiver,” Lucius explained. “Nanomachines designed to deliver an unbearable shock to your nerve endings. I slipped some into your Budweiser earlier. I hope you don’t mind. A useful little present we received from John—military issue, apparently. The machines lodge inside your capillary vessels, which means that when they’re activated they cause incredible pain in your extremities—fingers, toes, the like.”
The pain had miraculously disappeared, although my body was still reeling from shock. Gasping for breath, I looked over at Lucia’s face. Her tears made her black eyeliner run all the way down her cheeks.
The face of a woman crying for a man who had betrayed her. Crushed by conflicting, overwhelming emotions.
“Unfortunately, Lucia brought you right into our club. That raised the stakes. Now, if it had just been a matter of my own personal liberty, well, that might have been one thing. I could have coped with being arrested. But there was the danger of having our entire library seized. If that happened, all our friends, colleagues, and customers, all our compatriots fighting for personal liberties in Europe and America—they’d all be outed. We had to preempt that at all costs. That was why I needed to stake out Lucia’s place.”
“So you’ve been watching me all this time?” Lucia asked.
“Forgive me. As I explained, it was for the greater good.”
“I thought you were the anonymous heroes who went underground to avoid the constant surveillance of government and industry. And yet you’re happy to put other people under surveillance yourselves?” Lucia asked.
“It’s a truly troubling dilemma,” Lucius replied.
I thought of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And those who were already free watched over others so that all could be “equally” free.
“I seem to remember Stalin and Pol Pot also being ‘troubled’ by similar dilemmas,” I said, sneeering, and immediately received another payload of pain for my efforts.
“Tuvi, could you hold off for a moment, please?” Lucius calmly asked the youth. Luckily for me, the kid complied.
“You’ll have to forgive Tuvi—it seems you roughed him up good and proper, so you’ll have to think of this as your just deserts,” Lucius said.
“Ha, so this is Crime and Punishment now, is it? Well, I wonder when you’re going to get your punishment for what you’ve done in the name of freedom.”
“Don’t worry about us. And besides, people in glass houses … you were observing Lucia just as much as we were, no?”
“What?” Lucia looked at me, stunned.
I knew it. I had always known it. Sooner or later we would end up here. It had been inevitable from the start. Really, why had I ever expected anything else?
Yes, I know all about you, Ms. Lucia Sukrova.
I know that you were mistress to a married man.
I know the restaurants where you and John Paul dined together.
I know at which branches of Starbucks you drank your morning cappuccinos.
I know how many condoms John Paul bought.
I wanted to scream out loud. For the youth to press the button on his Mob and never let go. For my fingers and toes and all my body to explode and blast my consciousness into tiny fragments. I wanted and deserved any and all pain that the world could throw at me.
“You see, Lucia,” Lucius said, “this man has been watching you in order to try and capture John Paul. He’s an American secret agent. A somewhat cultured American agent, perhaps, but a secret agent nonetheless. Cultured enough to capture your heart, at least.”
I looked at the young man, Tuvi. Press the button, I willed. Make me squirm in agony. Show me in my wretched agony to Lucia. But Tuvi saw through me. He looked down on me. I was a deer in the headlights, not worthy of another thought.
Hell is here. Inside your mind. Job done. No need for any more pain.
“John’s waiting for you outside, Lucia.” Lucius pointed Lucia toward the exit. Gently but firmly. Time to go.
Lucia glanced toward the exit before turning her gaze back on me. Was she hesitating? Or condemning me? I was so overwhelmed by guilt that I could no longer tell.
An eternity of agony. It was agony to be looked at by Lucia. Her piercing gaze was unbearable. And yet I didn’t want her to go. I wanted her to stay here.
Your ex is a mass murderer. He’s responsible for more deaths than Stalin. I could have told her that. Shouted it out. Except … except—what right did I have to tell her?
“Lucius … don’t let this man die,” Lucia said.
“Lucia, please. I abhor killing.”
Upon hearing what she needed to hear, Lucia turned around and left the club. I listened to her fading footfalls, my insides churning in a cocktail of regret.
The door closed, and the footsteps faded away completely. Lucius and his henchmen stared down at the abyss, at me, the wretched insect.
No one was speaking anymore. They were weighed down by the burden of what was about to happen, what had to happen. They were gritting their teeth. Doing what they had to do for the sake of freedom. To resist the evil will of those who insisted on watching them.
That was why I now had to die.
“I thought you abhorred killing,” I said.
“Indeed, I do.” Lucius actually did look genuinely sorry for what he was about to do. Just as, I’m sure, Hitler once did, and Stalin. Or, indeed, the ex-brigadier general that I had dispatched once upon a time, or our captive Ahmed from Somalia. Lucius might have felt guilty, but his guilt was of no value. Just as my guilt toward Lucia was of no value.
“That’s why it pains me so much to have to do this,” he said.
It was at that moment that a mosquito buzzed in front of me. It was as if I were in a dream—a final mirage I was seeing in the face of death. The mosquito hovered and settled on my middle finger.
The middle finger I had dabbed with pheromones earlier.
Lucius noticed the mosquito.
“You … a Tracer Dog—”
I lifted my bound hands to cover my right ear, using my shoulder to cover the left. I opened my mouth wide and braced myself.
The world roared, and the south wall exploded. A huge shock wave slammed through the room. Fragments of the wall and dust and debris filled the room, blinding us all. Lucius and his group were instantaneously immobilized. Many of them would have ruptured eardrums. I had managed to block my ears and open my mouth in time, just about, and even so my head was ringing.
All Special Operations I Detachment personnel had indoor assault training drilled into us during basic training at Killing House. During the training we had to take turns in shifts: who would be the assailants, who would be the targets, and who would be the hostages. The one thing I took away from my turn as a hostage was that when Special Forces attack, you had better eat dirt if you want to survive. Hit the ground and wait until it’s all over. Stay standing and you had no right to complain if your putative rescuers shot you dead. Your average Special Forces man was a crack headshot.
Because of this, I had no idea who on my team did what and who killed who. If ever there was a situation where curiosity would have killed the cat, it was this.
The entire assault operation took less than three minutes. It was a fairly small club after all. The dust never even had a chance to settle.
“How’s it hanging, Clavis?”
I recognized that voice. I stumbled up and beckoned for Williams to untie me.
“You look like a ghost under all that dust,” Williams said, brushing some of the powdered concrete from my body. “Anyway, where’s the girl? Lucia.”
I stared out through the giant hole in the wall that now looked out onto the cityscape of a Prague evening. The labyrinth of stone. The city of a hundred spires.
“I don’t know. She’s gone.”
I was shattered. Everything was numb, and I longed for pain. If only I had pain, I could escape from my weariness. I knew it. I needed pain, punishment, urgently.
And yet all Williams could do was kill me with kindness. Gentle, thoughtful, funny Williams. The last thing in the world that I needed right now.