Tecumseh is on the other end of Dawn’s phone and listens to it ring six times. She doesn’t have a voicemail because it apparently weeds out the cold-callers and scam artists and because if something is really important they can just text her the details instead. Tecumseh thinks that his is highly unprofessional and will not reflect well upon her whenever she finishes with her contract with C-SPEAR. Whether she thinks she’ll finish her contact with C-SPEAR alive is a whole other matter, one that Tecumseh doesn’t dare involve himself in.
“What’s up?” she asks.
So casual, like she didn’t just make him wait fifteen seconds. Normal people answer the phone with a ‘Hello?’
“Quite a bit, actually,” Tecumseh answers. “Just finished up the interrogation.”
“You went to the place I told you?”
“Of course.”
“Was it good?”
“We haven’t eaten.”
On the other end of the line, Tecumseh can hear Dawn exhale.
“We were preoccupied with more important matters,” Tech adds. “Everything’s ten quid here. Don’t know if that’s a sign of quality or not.”
“Ten quid or ten dollars?”
“How about you come down here and figure it out for yourself?”
“I just might,” she responds. “Just so I can kick your ass.”
Tech chuckles from the safety of the bistro on 16th Street. All the north-south streets are numbered, while east-west streets of Nineveh are named after old Assyrian and Babylonian kings – Ashurnasirpal, Ashurbanipal, Tiglath-Pileser, etc. But something’s, off, today. Its in her voice.
“You sound tense.”
Dawn exhales again. Tech hears the faint hmmm and whrrr of a vending machine fetching something, then the crack of a carbonated can opening.
“Guess who just got out of a meeting with the council?”
“My condolences,” Tech replies. “How’s my Eva?”
“Good,” Dawn replies, then takes a sip of whatever it was she got from the machine. “She’s feeling pink today. You’ve known her for longer than I have, you can figure out what that means.”
“She’s not an iguana,” Tech replies.
“You mean a chameleon?”
“Tell you what, I’m gonna bust your fuckin’ skull open.”
Dawn sharply laughs on the other side. If you can’t threaten horrifying violence to your closest friends, who can you threaten horrifying violence too? Your boss? Not when your boss is the President of the country you’re living in.
“I’d consider it a favour after what I just went through.”
“Anything fun?”
“’Tasia snapped as Santiago. That was fun.”
“What’d she call him?”
“Next time you see her, you can ask her yourself.”
So she called Santiago a fag to his face, Tech thinks. Always fun. It’s unreal that she and Ashara get along so well. Gonna have to figure out that angle.
“Anything else?”
“We’ve got another new member.”
“Another one?”
“Yeah. She’s not a kid, though. Looks legit.”
“Who’s the benefactor?”
“Some fuckin’ Saudi prince. Can’t remember his name.”
“Is she nice?”
Dawn thinks for a moment. Her footsteps echo off the tile and into the phone’s speaker, through the airwaves and then into Tecumseh’s ears. She needs quieter shoes, something without flat soles. Nice can mean several things and Tech means all of them all at once.
“Yeah, I’d say so. Probably closer to your age, too. Name’s Farrah al-Aziz.”
“I’ll be respectful.”
“You better.”
Tech grins again. To his right, Cyrus intently reads from the local newspaper’s sports section. The city has a rather vibrant sports scene; football and basketball primarily, and not that bloody American rugby football shite. Real football, that you play with your feet. But the sports section also covers American sports news. It’s a Thursday in late October; there’s an NFL game on tonight, along with recaps and previews of the World Series – Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Phillies (what a stupid fucking name!).
Because of the eight-hour time difference he's stuck reading yesterday’s New York Times. Kid’s bored, no phone. He keeps glancing over at Tech. Waiting.
Dimitri has a phone and he’s scrolling through his Instagram feed. Out of the corner of his eye Tech sees a rapidly passing stream of scantily clad women, wearing unfathomably extravagant underwear or swimsuits that would disintegrate when hit by a wave or tight shirts and tighter yoga pants. Then again, what other purpose is there for Instagram?
“How’d you treat my friends?” Okonkwo and St. Claire, Tech figures. “They’ll tell me if you gave them shit.”
“Friends seems like a strong word.”
“I like them too much to call them ‘assets.’”
“Aren’t they members of a globally-recognized terrorist organization?”
“Yeah, what’s your point?”
“My point is that –”
“Tell her about Ivanov!”
By the time Tech turns to face Cyrus he’s back to the paper. The travel section now, an article on how nice the Namibian safaris are at this time of year. Kid’s doing everything in his power to not ask Dimitri if he has any games on his phone.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Was that…Cyrus?” Dawn asks. Tech can practically hear the gears in her brain turning during her moment of pause.
“Yes,” Tech replies, then takes a sip of free, complementary ice water. Makes an overly dramatic, well-refreshed ‘ahhhhhh’ noise. Best to start at the beginning.
“It’s a long story.”
***
Despite living in this city for upwards of a year, Tech could never quite get the hang of moving within it. He drove westward on Ashurnasirpal Street and could barely fit the team’s black, stealthily armoured Range Rover through the throngs of other cars trying to occupy the same spaces. Nineveh traffic took the form of dozens of foreign cars and trucks and vans from every corner of the world. Taxi drivers in yellow and black driving their coupes and saloons from Ford and Kia and XPeng and vans and trucks made by Wuling and Mitsubishi and Dacia and the occasional dipshit finance bro driving a McLaren or Mercedes like Lewis Hamilton. Everyone always drove on the wrong side of the road and nobody used their turn signals. It felt like there were too many people for this city.
And then he would turn onto one of the north-south streets and found it desolate. Buildings towered above on all sides, all sorts of bizarre architecture standing twenty stories off the ground – an apartment building with an undulating, wave-like series of balconies, a tall obelisk entirely of glass that served as some sort of local corporate branch, a fifty-story skyscraper that spiralled upwards, openings and terraces on each floor; a forty-four story building that was tall and slender and perfectly square at the base and roof, and more and more, an architects playground. They’re small compared to the monuments surrounding the Burj Wolfe, sitting at the intersections of Nebuchadnezzar Avenue and 4th, 5th, and 6th streets. And more importantly they served as hedge-fund founded make-work programs for American and British construction companies. The contractors used local, Mosuli labour to build them and paid them slave wages and made enormous amounts of money, then the hedge funds who own the building rent and sell the apartments and offices within for even more money. Everyone wins except for the Iraqi who fell forty stories to his death.
And yet, despite the capacity of these buildings the streets surrounding them are ghost-town empty. The buildings are occupied primarily by empty rooms, speculation. Each building has maybe twelve people within it; five of them are the aforementioned dipshit finance bros with their luxury supercars, one is an honest worker trying to eke out a living in the ‘Future Capital of the World’ the hard way, and the other six are all staff, housekeepers and janitors.
It’s completely unsustainable. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of financial history knows that skyrocketing prices based entirely upon speculation will only lead to disaster, whether its tulip bulbs or shares of a debt-buying company or housing or digital money.
The place Tech needed to be sat somewhere on this street – Take-Ten Italian Bistro. Couldn’t be that Italian because if it were, the name of the place would be in Italian and not English. The sides of the road were marked for parking with neat white lines designating acceptable parking spots and shining parking meters and they were all empty, waiting for people to park their cars there. Made for ten years from now. Right now, it was Nottingham trying to be London.
He pulled the Range Rover to the right despite all his instincts telling him to turn left, and nestled the mammoth automobile between sharply painted white lines. He exited the car and the wind howled through the tight streets, forced between tall skyscrapers.
“Is this the place?” Dimitri asked, practically shouting to get over the wind.
Tech looked down at his phone. Its ‘Maps’ app displayed the streets of Nineveh. He swiped down and changed to the phone’s ‘Notes’ app, where the topmost note told him that the meeting was supposed to happen at ‘Take-Ten Bistro on Whatever-the-Fuck Street,’ in Dawn’s exact words at seven-thirty this morning. The nearest place named ‘Take-Ten’ was across the Atlantic. This had to have been the place.
“I think so,” Tech replied, hedging against the possibility that one of the two were wrong. Dawn was preoccupied with sparring against Jake when she gave him the address, throwing elbows and knees and punches and kicks that blistered the air and that he always managed to intercept with a blocking pad before the limb or joint collided with his face. He was a braver man than Tech was, stepping into the ring with her.
Dimitri and Cyrus stepped out of the car after him. He towered over the two; Dimitri was barely over six feet while Cyrus was a perfectly average five-nine which made him smaller than all but two of the team. He needed to shave; his beard was scruffy and patchy and his moustache didn’t attach to the rest of his beard. He still wore his suit and tie and blazer from last night, wrinkled and in need of an ironing.
Dimitri wore a tight red and white football jersey – Spartak Moscow – with a long-sleeved white shirt underneath, along with light blue acid-washed jeans that were a size too tight and red and white sneakers from some brand Tecumseh was completely unfamiliar with. Tech, on the other hand, tried to keep up the honour of C-SPEAR and Standard Aether, a navy-blue blazer, black button-up, navy trousers, and shining black Oxfords. If only Xiuying could see him now.
“Why’s it called Take-Ten, anyways?” Cyrus asked.
“I suppose they want you to take ten minutes and have lunch,” Dimitri replied.
“Who eats lunch in ten minutes?”
“The Italians must possess superpowers we are unaware of.”
Tech went around the SUV and started to plug loose coins into the machine. A dollar only gets fifteen minutes of parking time. Tech didn’t know how long this would take. Dimitri and Cyrus chattered back and forth in the meantime.
“What were you saying earlier, about, ah, what was it…”
“Gassed up sixes?” Cyrus clarified. This conversation happened in the car and if Tech wasn’t driving he would’ve grabbed one of the guns in the trunk and shot himself in the head. Why was Dimitri trying to restart it? He rifled through his pockets, looking for more coins, and when he found they were all empty he went back to the car’s glove compartment and looked through there. All while the other two’s insipid conversation continued apace.
“Yes. What is, ah, a ‘gassed up six?’ In your parlance, I mean.”
“So it’s a way to describe a girl who thinks she’s a nine or ten or shit, but in reality –”
“No,” Dimitri interrupted. “I fully comprehend the conceptual, just, why is it important that a girl thinks she is hotter than she is?”
“It’s about self-respect and shit, like, put it this way –”
“What is so bad about a woman having self-respect? Are there such a thing as a ‘gassed up six’ for men?”
“I guess? But, its not that, because a girl who’s a nine or a ten can get away with some shit right?”
“Are you trying to tell me that you will let a hot woman do things to you that another, less-attractive woman will not?”
“No, but –”
“So you are saying that your self-respect is so low that you will let an attractive woman step all over you? And that you will only assert yourself when faced with a woman of lesser attractiveness?”
“No, its not that, but, you get the point, right?”
A satisfying ker-thunk sounds from the parking meter as the last coin falls into place. Tech presses the ‘ENTER’ button and the timer begins counting down from an hour.
“We’re done with this conversation,” he told the two.
“But –”
“No ‘buts’, kid. I do not care. This is a stupid fucking conversation.”
“It’ll add a decade to your lifespan, at least.”
“Says who?”
“Guy on YouTube, called ‘The Original Alpha –”
Dimitri clamped his hands over his mouth to keep himself from cackling. Tech just put his hand on his hips and looked at Cyrus, almost awestruck. ‘The Original Alpha’? Really? Really?
“No, you don’t get it!”
Tech only got it because of his exposure to Dawn and Sophia, who never stopped yattering about various online happenings to each other. There were various internetsmen who talked about this; misogyny masquerading as self-worth and traditional values. They all had stupid names and did low-quality steroids and paid women to hang off their arms all to impress socially isolated young men. At least, that’s the impression Tech got from the video and edits and Instagram posts that the two giggled at.
“He’s really smart! He knows about self-worth and shit –”
“You attended Loyola-Houston, correct?” Dimitri asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“It is one of those gender-segregated academies, correct?”
“Yeah,” Cyrus replied. A puzzled expression gnaws across his face. His bushy eyebrows furrow. “Why?”
Dimitri looked at Tech, who looked at Dimitri. What was it that Dawn said about Jasmine? A project? Looks like they have two on their hands, now. One for Xiuying and one for Tech. One’s infested with social anxiety and religious fundamentalism, the other riddled with the insecurity of a teenage boy propped up by strange men online. The Academy never trained him for this.
“Nothing, I am just inquiring,” Dimitri replied.
“Inquiring?”
“Simply inquiring.”
Tecumseh looked up at the sign above. ‘TAKE-10’ was emblazoned on the sign, vertical, above a clock – the big hand at 2 and the small at 12, creating a red wedge that stuck out against the white of the clock. Kind of like a slice of pizza.
“Are you lot done?” he asked.
The wind howled and ruffled Cyrus’s long hair. His was too shaggy; he needed a haircut, or at least a stylist. The existence of Jake’s hair proved that C-SPEAR had no codes regarding hair length, but the kid needed to take care of his split-ends.