The bag was pulled roughly from my head, leaving me blinking in the sudden, harsh light. Momentarily unable to see, but obviously not alone, I raised a hand to shield my eyes.
“What time is it?” I groaned.
“Time for you to make a decision,” a muffled voice replied from behind my shoulder, so close I could feel his breath on my ear.
I tried to turn to face him, but a firm hand pushed my shoulders back against the chair.
“Face forward. Answer the question.”
I rolled my eyes,
“This is all a bit melodramatic, isn’t it, Wallace?”
He scoffed, irritated that I had recognized his voice despite the attempt at a disguise. But really, who else was it going to be?
“Look,” he sniffed, dropping the affectation. “You were promised two days to think it over. You’ve had them. Now you have to choose.”
“Oh, I already made my choice the last time we spoke. I really just wanted the time off,” I shrugged.
In truth, I had wanted to go back to him immediately with my answer, but I couldn’t risk overplaying my hand, making him suspicious about my motives. I wasn’t supposed to be eager to do this. So, I had bided my time. The way I would have if I had no pressing, time sensitive need to learn his plans. It hadn’t been easy.
“And your decision?” he asked.
His hand still rested on my shoulder, fingers touching my neck. I think it was meant to seem idle, but I could tell that he was feeling my pulse, trying to gage my honesty. I was a little bit insulted. What did he think I was, am amateur?
“I’m in, of course. I may not like it, but I can see what needs to be done.”
“Excellent,” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I knew that you would see the truth, eventually.”
I fought the urge to shake my head. The truth, huh? That was why no one was easier to lie to than a zealot. Even if they were otherwise intelligent people, they were usually very easy to convince that you agreed with them, because they had trouble conceiving of anyone not sharing their most deeply held beliefs. It was, of course, obvious that they were correct, so how could anyone disagree?
“Hopefully, I can at least help reduce the risk of civilian casualties.”
“Whatever soothes your conscience,” Wallace replied, removing his hand. “Now you can turn around.”
I swiveled in my chair to find that Wallace was not my only visitor tonight. Three other men stood silently, arms clasped behind their backs, watching for my reaction. I laughed.
“Wow, this is a real blast from the past, isn’t it?”
I recognized each of the men, they had all worked it the Organization for many years, so it would be stranger if I didn’t, though there was much more grey in their hair than the last time I had seen them. I hadn’t known any of them especially well, however. The only one I had worked directly with was Anderson, on the far left, but I had met each at least a few times.
“I was certain all of you were retired,” I straddled the chair and folded my arms over the back.
All of them had left the organization years before the Domini incident, which had likely saved their lives, now that I thought about it.
“Funny, I’d heard the same about you,” Anderson replied, with a smirk.
“Touché,” I turned back to Wallace. “Did you really pull all of your old friends back in for one more job?”
Wallace smiled,
“Why not? There are few left with their experience, their skill.”
Their hatred of ubarae, I mentally noted, but kept the thought to myself. Still, it was clear he had carefully chosen the members of the old guard that he knew had agreed with his own philosophy. In fact, if I remembered correctly, many of their ‘retirements’ had been less than voluntary. All three had been pushed out by incidents similar to the one that landed Wallace at a desk. Excessive force, mistreatment of a suspect, mistreatment of a witness… They had been forced out when I was still relatively new as an agent, part of a bit of a house cleaning for the Organization that had begun years earlier. An attempt to eliminate the virulent undercurrent of hatred. It had been fairly successful, considering that I sometimes forgot that such attitudes had been pretty common before my time. But obviously not completely. Either way, Wallace had chosen his main team well. I certainly wouldn’t be wasting my time attempting to win any hearts and minds here. I wondered how many more old school agents were waiting in the wings.
“Fair enough. It will be nice to work with experienced professionals again,” I smiled. A little bit of ego stroking seemed to be in order, here, as much as that chaffed.
“Yes, well, Pete insists that you have a talent for planning. I think we could manage this alone, but there isn’t really any harm in running the plan past a fresh set of eyes, I suppose,” the man on the right idly stroked the edge of his salt and pepper moustache as he spoke.
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“Now, now, Reardon,” the man in the centre smiled encouragingly. “We are embarking on a tremendous undertaking that will affect the entirety of human history from this moment forward. I am certain we can use all the help that we can get.”
“Well said, Hank,” Wallace clapped him on the shoulder then turned to Anderson on the left.
. “Saul?”
“I already agreed. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t, would I? So, how about we all stop playing like we are cold war spies and get on with it. It’s too early in the morning for this bullshit.”
I chuckled slightly; Anderson hadn’t changed much in the years since we worked together. At least he hadn’t become any less… blunt.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I clapped my hands. “Since it is unanimous, shall we get started? Who’s going to lay out the plan out for me?”
“Well, I say since Hank is feeling so optimistic about this, he can handle it. I am going back to sleep. I didn’t think we all needed to be involved in this in the first place,” Saul grumbled. “We are here to do a job, not play games.”
He gave Wallace a pointed look before turning to go.
“Wait up, Saul, I’ll ride back with you. I’m sure Henry can tell us both if the girl has anything useful to add, right?” Reardon followed Anderson out without waiting for an answer.
As the door shut, Henry shrugged apologetically,
“My colleagues have never been the most patient of men. And neither of them is really any more pleasant when their sleep is interrupted. Don’t take it personally.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I replied, turning back to Wallace. “Honestly, I agree with them. Is there a reason we had to do this in the middle of the night, instead of over breakfast or something?”
“I did not want you to have time to prepare yourself, because I wanted to get your true, unvarnished decision,” Wallace explained. “I wanted to see if you could really be trusted, before we brought you in on this. It is too important to leave to chance.”
But not too important to treat this like the initiation into a Fraternal organization, apparently, I sighed internally. Whatever, I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Well, I hope you are satisfied. Now,” I turned to Hank Sutherland. “How about you convince me that we aren’t just fucking around, here.”
“Certainly,” he agreed amiably. “The broad strokes are easy enough to explain. I imagine you have guessed parts of it yourself. But, I will go over it anyway, just to be sure. The details, as you can imagine, we are still working on. Despite what Reardon and Anderson may have implied, the planning is not quite complete, and we would welcome your input in several areas where key decisions are yet to be made. I will highlight those as they come up. But let’s start with the basics: obviously the problem we have been attempting to solve is how we can eliminate the ubarae, while minimizing human casualties. The simplest way would, of course, be to use Partials to pick them off, one by one. But there are simply too many of them and too few of us for that to be a practical solution. No, we need a way to deal with the problem en masse. But that is challenging in the same way that cancer treatment is challenging. How do you eliminate something so similar to the ‘host’ without simply killing everything? And the answer, of course, is not dissimilar to the answer in that case: chemical treatments that target the disease but are less dangerous to the host. I am sure you already figured out that that drug you… obtained the other day would be useful in that regard. You even observed its dramatic effect for yourself. We plan to incorporate that chemical into a device that will aerosolize and disperse it, resulting in overdose and death for any ubarae within range. It is a humane death, really. More than they deserve. If we deploy this weapon in crowded areas with high foot traffic across the globe, we should be able to dramatically reduce ubarae numbers, while causing a minimum of human casualties.”
Wallace preened, clearly this had been his idea in the first place.
“I’m going to have to stop you there for just a sec,” I broke in. “When you say ‘minimum’ you do realize that there are going to be mass human casualties from this, right? Because what you are suggesting is going to kill a whole lot of human beings. There are people with preexisting conditions, people already taking opioids, children, the elderly… I could go on. My point is even if this was safe for an average human, which I doubt, there is still a substantial portion of the population who will be almost as vulnerable as the ubarae.”
“Well, some collateral damage is unavoidable,” Sutherland admitted, still attempting to downplay the situation. “Like in cancer treatment, some healthy cells have to die. Still, in the long run, this will save lives. It will save humanity.”
I wanted to ask how long of a run we were talking about, considering that ubarae usually killed very few people every year, but knew I couldn’t push back too hard.
“I know that this sort of thing is challenging for you, Rayna,” Wallace interjected. “Just let us deal with that, and you focus on the technical aspects, hmm? Trust that we know what we are doing.”
I sucked a breath in through my nose, trying to remain calm. Slugging the patronizing asshole would get me nowhere.
“Fine. Then, from a technical standpoint, you know this won’t work, right? You can’t blanket the whole planet in this stuff, so you will never eliminate all ubarae this way. It’s ridiculous.”
“That’s true,” Henry agreed. “But that isn’t the point. The ubarae that remain will, of course, still need to be hunted down, but with few remaining, the numbers will be more manageable, and they will have a more difficult time hiding. Besides, we have to try something, even if it is imperfect. Anything that decreases their numbers is a win for humanity, while we brainstorm more foolproof methods.”
I frowned, chewing on my lower lip as I considered his pitch. It was about as bad as I had expected. I did not relish being right, in this instance.
“Trust me, we all understand your skepticism,” Henry continued. “We have asked all of these questions of ourselves, many times. And that makes this trial run all the more important. It will allow us to see the effect on humans and ubarae for ourselves and then we can adjust accordingly. But I think you’ll see that this is the most viable option.”
“When and where is this happening?” I asked, finally getting to the crux of the matter.
“That is the question, isn’t it?” Henry chuckled. “There are several events taking place in the near future that would make excellent targets, but we have not yet been able to agree on one. In fact, we have been arguing about it for some time, now. Hopefully, you can break the stalemate and find a way to get everyone to agree to a location.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“Well then, get dressed and we will take you on the tour. That’s the other reason we did this early, better to see each venue before the crowds arrive,” Wallace headed for the door and gestured for Sutherland to follow. “We’ll wait outside. Join us when you are ready.”
There were, in truth, few things I wanted less than to assist them in planning this. But, without a place and a date, I couldn’t tip Gail off to anything meaningful. And I had been right about Wallace housing this group offsite, at least based on what Reardon said about ‘riding back’ with Anderson. So, even if Gail raided this place, there was a decent chance she wouldn’t find them, and they would still proceed with their ‘test run’. No, I needed to play along until I had enough information for her to sweep everyone up at once. Just a bit longer, hopefully. With a sigh, I rose from my chair and opened a drawer, trying to decide which sweater was best to plan a terrorist attack in.