CHAPTER 21
The next morning, Constantine awoke resolved to take that plane-ride out of town. Whatever had happened here had already happened, and the truth of it was probably sick, but the truth of it was also well above his paygrade. Constantine had done his part, had helped them investigate, had helped them retrieve some pieces of that armor. If they did not want him involved anymore, that was their call. If whatever it was all about had gone to such a level of secrecy that they were prepared to kill their own over it, and they were offering him the door alive and in one piece, that was a professional courtesy he should probably accept.
In the movies, the intrepid hero would take on the System single-handed, fight the injustice of it all. But there were no heroes. Constantine certainly was no hero. He was dirty, like everyone else, and he knew it. Furthermore, if there was a coverup, it probably had a good reason behind it, given the gravity of the situation abroad and the implications of what they had uncovered. If a couple of guys on the team had not taken their walking papers and walked, then that was on them. This was the real world, and the stakes were higher than the principles of a couple of intractable government employees.
Constantine would leave as he had been told to do, and whatever government cabal was running the show would take the information he and the rest of the team had provided and would do with it what they thought best. With any luck it would give them some better leverage against whatever was going on out there. In the meantime, who could say? Perhaps this whole experience would open a door for Constantine down the road. In any case, he had been afforded the chance to do some things that most of his peers had never done and would never do: true special operations.
He loaded his bags into his car and left. The vehicle was government-owned, though not marked as such. He would leave it at the airport. They’d find it. Constantine made only one detour, to stop by the post office and close out his mailbox.
Amongst his mail, of course, was the letter that would upend his resolve, though he did not yet know it. He stuffed everything into his backpack unexamined and did not give it another look until he was seated on his flight and airborne. Only once the aircraft had reached cruising altitude and the captain had turned off the fasten seatbelt sign, only once he had put the whole sordid affair, so suddenly ended, absolutely behind and more than twelve thousand feet below him, did he go through the little stack of envelopes and find Sing’s missive.
It was not labeled as such. It was addressed to Constantine at his P. O. box, the address hand-written, and no return-address offered. Postage had been paid at the post office, rather than by stamp. Constantine ripped it open and found inside a hand-scrawled note on a sheet of otherwise blank printing paper.
“Rob,” it read. “I think the alliance has people in our government. They shut down our team, and they’re—” Sing had one-lined and corrected himself: “—I think they’re killing those of us who don’t play ball. I think it’s TFR. Eli packed up what we know about the AI after they closed him down and gave it to me, and now he’s dead. They’re saying he fell asleep at the wheel. I reached out to the Secretary, and now I think they’re after me too. I’m going to hide out. Watch your six. And watch out for Miss Ritter. She called me and said someone tried to reach her from the opposition. I told her to drop it, but I think they might try to kill her, especially if she does something stupid. Can you protect her? I hope so. She doesn’t deserve a bullet from one of ours. This is all fucked up. If our government is colluding with whoever is doing this, it’s over. They’ve got the whole world. It shouldn’t be possible. Stay safe, and keep Miss Ritter alive if you can. The data dump is at the address below. You’ll need a Tor browser to view it. I basically did what Miss Ritter’s friend did before they killed him. Maybe you can use it for leverage if you need to. All we can do now is try to survive and see what happens.” Sing had hand-written the .onion URL below his message.
Constantine read it through, and then he read it through again. Then he set it down in his lap and laid his head back against the headrest, looking up at the low panel above him from which the oxygen masks would descend in case of emergency. “Place the oxygen mask over your nose and mouth and breathe normally.” “Secure your mask before assisting others.” “Then hold on and hope for the best, because there’s nothing you can do about whether or not the plane is going to crash.” They always left that last part out, but that was the truth, and that was Sing’s conclusion. The plane was going… somewhere. Down, or out, but it had already been hijacked, if Sing was correct. The best any of them could do was stay conscious until the final fate of a world beyond their control revealed itself. Was that what all of their work was worth? Had the enemy beaten them to the punch, despite the best efforts of their best minds? Had the enemy been ahead of them the entire way?
And, what enemy? They still had no understanding of who was behind these machinations, who had masterminded this sudden alliance of all the world’s powers toward an unknown goal. Gods were striding unseen across the world, and even the Agency, and TF Royal, were subject to their whims. Constantine was just a Warrant in the Army. An ant. A soldier ant, perhaps, but an ant. His best efforts were a sting to the toe. Then he would be squashed or flicked away—if he was even noticed. That was no way to die. Sing was right. It was time to be smarter than an ant, stinging and dying because its nest had been disturbed and it knew no other way. Constantine could choose not to fight, could choose to survive and see what came. Whoever was behind this conspiracy, he was—or they were—extremely clever and intelligent. In all likelihood, they would make far better masters of the world than the historical crop, or would leave it organized in a way that could hardly be worse than it had been before.
Now was the time to keep a clear head, a low head. Maintain cover and wait.
With any luck, Sing had managed to do the same, and he was now in hiding somewhere. Constantine doubted it, but at least the letter afforded him some small hope. Sing was an alright guy; the thought of him being rubbed out like an ant by Royal made Constantine’s stomach turn.
The thought of the same happening to Melody Ritter similarly disturbed him. She was a good girl, an innocent. The least he could do was to warn her. When he landed, Constantine hailed a taxi for his ride home. It was more expensive than the modern app-based ride-selling services, but the government would foot the bill, as it was technically part of his travel expenses. He found it strange to be thinking about such things, given that that same government might be soon coming to an end, or to a radical change. That was the reality, though: even as the world ended, life went on. He had to go home and file a travel voucher, and face his wife, and deal with his son.
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Constantine arrived at his home to find it empty and quiet. A shock of dread went through him, but reason quickly supplanted that, and he found proof to quell his worries in short order: All of those messages and missed calls from his wife, which he had never quite found the time to review, had culminated in her decision to leave him and go to stay with her mother. The hasty hand-written note in his kitchen explained it all, and in no polite terms.
It struck him that this was a very cliché move. The mother. In the movies, they always took the child and went to stay with the mother. Did they do that in the movies because it was so often done in real life, or did they do that in real life because they had seen it in so many movies? Constantine had never considered it before, but he began to think that, if one really put some work into it, one could learn a great deal about life and society by studying movies and TV shows—and could probably learn a great deal of wisdom about how to live by studying them and then doing the opposite.
He sat down and turned on the television, not to think, but to escape from thinking, and he never noticed the irony. After a few minutes alone in his house, however, scrolling through streaming options, he realized they were all trash. He picked up his backpack and began rifling through the paperwork he had taken home with him. It was all unclassified, but even so it would need to be burned. If he wanted them to leave him alone, he had to make an honest and complete break from this matter. First, though, he would call Ritter and ensure that she did the same. It took him a minute to find her number, but he did, and he dialed it.
It rang.
And rang.
Just when he was certain it would transfer to voicemail, the line connected. Her voice said, “Hello?” Constantine felt relief shoot through him. Perhaps more of him than he had admitted wanted her to live. He remembered her big eyes looking up at him from the wheelchair. How could he be a man and not want to protect that?
“Miss Ritter?”
“Yes.”
“This is Rob Constantine. Do you remember me?”
“Mr. Constantine? Yes, I remember you. Did Mr. Sing call you? Is there something I can help with?” She sounded hopeful, earnest. Her innocence made him sad.
“No—I mean, yes. Sing contacted me. He wanted me to call you and tell you to get away from this business, and stay away.”
He heard silence on the line for a moment. That was her way. When he had spoken to her as he wheeled her down the hallway that day, she had looked up at him with those big eyes and just listened. When he had stopped talking, there had always been a moment before she replied, as if she was really thinking about what he had said. Rare breed, those who actually think before they open their traps.
“Why?” she asked after that moment had passed.
“Because he doesn’t want you to get killed. And neither do I, for that matter.”
“Mr. Constantine, I don’t believe that thing—whatever it is, a suit or some kind of supernatural thing, I don’t think it actually wants to kill me. I don’t think it means us any harm. I don’t think it really meant to kill Agent Raines, either.”
“You know about that?”
“It was all over the news.”
“Huh.” He knew there had been reports, but he had not been following the international media closely in recent months, due to Royal’s op tempo. It surprised him that they would have released her identity. “Well, I don’t know about that, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
Another pause, and then from her, “What are you talking about?”
“We all signed NDAs, Miss Ritter. I’m saying they won’t prosecute you in court if you break it.”
Pause. “Has someone already been killed?” she asked. “Is Mr. Sing okay?”
“Don’t worry about Sing. Worry about yourself, and the people you love. Drop it.”
“They can’t do that,” she said immediately. It was her first unconsidered response.
“They can,” he said.
“There are laws.”
“Yeah, well, people get murdered all the time, even though it’s illegal.”
Finally she was quiet again. When she spoke, she spoke slowly: “The team has been… disbanded, hasn’t it.”
This time, he was silent.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Are they going to try to kill you?”
“No, because I’m going to stay out of it and keep my mouth shut, other than calling you and telling you to do the same.”
He heard over the phone line the deep breath she took and then released. “They got to us. Whoever is behind it all, they’re in our own government. They shut us down.”
“We don’t know that,” he said. “Also, shut up. As far as we know, the government just shifted responsibility to another agency.”
“You think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know what happened, and I don’t care. We’re done. I’m done; you’re done; Sing’s done. We’re all done. It’s not our problem anymore.”
A moment’s quiet, and then she said, “But that’s not true. It doesn’t stop there. Whatever’s happening, if they’re willing to kill you and me, they’re willing to kill anybody. If we don’t fight them, then who’s next? I mean, you work for the government. What if they tell you to kill me?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, and they won’t.”
“Are you sure?”
Was he sure that they would not order him to silence her? Fairly sure. They had wanted him out, not in. Was he sure he would not do it if the Agency ordered him so—if they implied a threat against his child if he refused? It frightened him that his mind jumped to that eventuality so quickly. Was this his world, now? If they had killed Patterson and probably killed Sing, if they had made a late-night call upon him at his apartment, then yes, that was his world, now. That was their world. The question was, in truth, only whether or not it was new. Had the Agency always done business that way, in the shadows, committing acts of domestic murder and such to further a national security agenda? He had always presumed that to be the purview of fiction, but now he could not be sure. It was the same question he had entertained after reading his wife’s departure note. Did art imitate life, or life art?
Constantine realized that he was still on the line with her, and that he had given no answer.
“I see,” she said, taking his silence as an answer in its own right. “Mr. Constantine, someone has to tell people what’s going on. We can’t let something like this happen, breaking all these laws, all in secret. It… it takes all the meaning out of life if people don’t know the truth, if people can’t learn from what’s really going on. If people can’t learn, then life has no meaning.”
“You’re young. You don’t have kids.”
“Then… maybe that’s why it should be me.”
“Are you seriously prepared to risk your life over this?”
She was silent again, and he let her think. Thinking was exactly what she needed to do. Young people too often too easily answered that question. They did not think it through. Try it a few times, he would say. Experience the closeness of death a few times, as he had, and then talk about risking one’s life.
Of course, she had experienced exactly that.
“You know, Mr. Sing said the same thing they said. ‘I can’t protect you.’ They can’t protect me anymore.”
“Who said that?”
“They. Whoever ‘they’ are. The people working with the thing. The people resisting.”
“Well, you need to take them seriously. No one’s going to protect you if you do something stupid.”
“Still…” she said. “It needs to be done.”
“You’d be throwing your life away. Whatever you’re thinking of doing, they’ll kill you before you can do it.”
“How would you do it?” she asked. “How can I protect myself?”
“You’re just a kid,” he said.
“So you’re saying I have no chance. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Nothing but stay away and keep your head down.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Don’t think about it. Just do what I’m—” But a beep-beep-beep told him that the call had ended. She had hung up on him. Quiet Melody Ritter, of the big eyes and thoughtful way, had hung up on him.
Constantine looked down at his phone and cursed.