The more Kane tried to lay low, the more she felt like a sore thumb sticking out.
She had ditched her wallet – her real one, anyways – in favor of a backup she'd used for a cover a few years ago. It had a real, verifiable driver's license in it – just not one for a real person. It would fool gas station attendants, law enforcement, even the military.
But probably not the people the who were actually looking for her.
She'd paid cash for every single purchase since leaving the Pentagon, which of course included her "contact" in Bethesda that swapped out the license plates, physical and digital, on the pickup truck.
Kane had stopped every hour or so on her journey to check Hall's pulse. It seemed steady enough, although the process of finding a secluded-enough place to remove her from a body bag was far from easy.
She has managed though, like always. Maintaining her cover, survival, the constant swivel-head mindset…these things were second nature. That had been her life for well over a decade.
Well…
It was over a decade save for those three months. Those three damn-near-perfect months in the suburbs. God, it was so kitschy, so normative, so…quiet! She'd expected that time to be boring. But even the remote, sleepless hours of the night and early morning were filled with too much engaging conversation to ever be boring. Paszek was hardly in the upper echelon of intellectual minds at face value, but it was clear to Kane that there was something distinctly emotionally critical in his head…something that made them more fit for each other than either of them were really ever willing (or able) to admit out loud.
And she would have attended every single godforsaken HOA meeting just to keep that existence alive.
That existence, however, was gone, and would never return. Not in this country, anyways. Switzerland, maybe? Iceland? Maybe even Greenland if things got desperate. Which they were, of course. Things were very desperate.
For now, the destination was still West. She had enough cash to make it for at least another week. There was more – plenty more, in fact - in her burner accounts, but there was no guarantee those wouldn't be frozen like her main one.
She would need even more green. Because there was no way she could do this by herself.
This chair sucked.
Paszek had imagined that not having any water for the last 31 hours would have been the worst part of being stuck here.
But it was definitely the chair. Like any soldier, he had long ago mastered the art of sleeping on sand and gravel and foliage and leaned up against a rock. A poorly balanced dining room chair was impossible for mortals to sleep in, though. He had briefly considered swinging his body around and toppling the chair, but he quickly reasoned that the width of the chair legs would keep him dangling just over the floor.
It's not that being painfully dehydrated didn't suck, either. But some sleep would at least relieve him of his physical and mental stress for a short while.
And it was still, still, still cold as shit. The building was distinctly urban. Not too new, but it had to be near a metropolitan area. Too cold to be anywhere near the coast. Milwaukee was his best guess, but he didn't have much at all to support it.
Paszek had to figure that Savior had at least a dozen more people under his thumb. There's no way they could have extracted him from the Pentagon without a team of at least 3 or 4. More to transport him without trouble. And there was no way he just stumbled across this vacant building. It needed to be purchased, inherited, wiped off of the records, something…
All of these circumstances, of course, being separate from the low humming drone that burrowed into his ears. It wasn't an air conditioner or a water heater or anything else standard issue. It was a low-frequency synthesizer being pumped in, noise from an electromagnetic pulse or something of the sort. The noise wasn't necessary, in all likelihood, but an intentional vexation courtesy of Savior. Paszek didn't waste much time in trying to psychoanalyze that decision.
For an EMP pulse to be sustained this constantly, Paszek figured that the field it covered was small, the entire room at the very most, but possibly less. Not that there was any guarantee he could get himself free even if his limbs worked properly, but it was worth considering. But an escape plan could only come after knowing exactly what he was up against, and time was not on his side.
On the other hand, Paszek had been a bit surprised that Savior hadn't chosen to address him just yet. The guy clearly had something of a theatrical side, and the opportunity to relish in the vulnerability of a captive should be too much to pass up for him, right?
Maybe time was on his side after all.
"Yeah, I did take some time to think about it," said Wes coldly. "And you know what? No! No, I will not do you a favor!"
Kane remained silent.
"We were friends! You were my best friend! And you cut me off with a text message…a decade ago! Oh, I'm sorry…" Wes continued. "What was it, 'CIA stuff," that was what kept you from talking to me a single time? Sending a card? An email?! Do you have any idea how hard these years have been for me? How alone I felt for so long"
"Wes…" she started.
"Now you want to talk?! Now you want to listen to me?! Whatever happened to…to…" he trailed off. "I…I don't know…what…"
Kane shut her eyes tightly as Wes choked back a sob.
"I just need you to tell me, Rachel…" he half-wept.
Kane swallowed audibly. She needed to be incredibly careful with her next few sentences.
"I've haven't been the person you would want me to be," she started. "I've done…bad things. I've done things I can never take back. And I've hurt a lot of people…and you're…you're one of those people, Wes."
She took in a deep breath.
"I don't expect you to forgive me. I don't deserve that. But there are forces at play, forces much larger than me and you and even the CIA. Innocent people are going to die and there's no one else I can turn to."
She could hear Wes exhale sharply through his nose.
"I don't need this from you," he spat, a sob still audible in his throat. "I'm not here so that you can manipulate me like you've been doing to everyone else for the past ten years. Why should I trust you? Why should I help you? People are going to die? So what? That's every day for you."
"I'm not calling you as an agent! I'm calling you as a friend," Kane replied.
Wes let out a fraction of a chuckle. "Friends? Are you fucking kidding me? I wish I could say we were, but that ship has sailed, Rachel. A long time ago."
Kane moved the phone away from her ear and bit hard on her lower lip. Forget the emotional angle. Time to get practical.
"You know, up until a few days ago, I would have given up a lot of things just to talk to you again," said Wes. "This is really cathartic in a way, knowing that I was even more delusional than I thought."
"I'm not going to waste any more time," said Kane in her trademark calculated voice. "The CIA has been performing experiments on deceased DNI patients. They also probably think that I'm a terrorist mastermind who tried to blow up the CDC building. But I was able to extract a live DNI patient from the Pentagon. I need your help to wake her up from a medically induced coma. Her and I can explain everything."
"Oh…" said Wes, blankly. "So now you're appealing to my obligations as a man of medicine? Did you consider turning off your CIA interrogator mode for even a second before calling?"
Kane cursed herself. He knew her too well.
"Actually, I need you to answer a question for me. If you don't answer honestly, I'm not helping you. Even if you do answer honestly, I still don't think I should help you, but at least I won't hang up the phone and call the police."
"I'll answer anything," she replied. She was prepared to do exactly that.
"What the hell happened in Cleveland?"
Paszek's urge to sleep had come on far more suddenly than he had expected. As per usual, he had no shortage of theories as to why, but it was hardly important. He was tired as hell. In some ways, it was a good thing. A few hours of sleep might do him some good, clear his head.
Finding a comfortable head position wasn't going to happen. Paszek had settled on slumping as far down in the chair as his restraints allowed as to provide something of a backdrop for his neck.
Endless thoughts about Kane's status, both rational and otherwise, had occupied much of Paszek's mind for the past…however many hours. Normally his DNI would keep track of that.
Was she even still alive? Paszek was willing to bet that there really was another bomb in the Pentagon. Did it go off? Is the entire country in a state of mass panic? The entire world?
For the purposes of his own sanity, Paszek committed himself to the idea that she was very much alive, and furthermore had prevented anything catastrophic from occurring in DC. The alternative to this idea was pure and utter oblivion – it reaped both tangible and emotional consequences far greater than Paszek was willing to face, now or ever.
Simply put, any scenario involving her death was meaningless to Paszek. Those were dead ends. Nothing would matter, and everything would have already been lost. It wasn't worth entertaining a future that bleak.
Paszek assumed that some part of Savior's plan involved framing him for Teele's murder. That was a given. But past that? He was drawing blanks. There were plenty of buildings to set off bombs in, plenty of chemical weapons to deploy…but where was he aiming? Paszek didn't buy that his entire motivation was some anarchical new world order. Something else was driving this, something…personal.
Which left Paszek with only more questions as to his identity. There were suspects, sure, but how many of them had any real connections to him? Curran and Hernandez certainly didn't. As suspicious as he was about Winslow, and regardless of how many mission reports she had read, they had only met the other day. That didn't track.
"I've been your savior before. I can do it again."
Those words had been echoing in his head ever since he left Ethiopia. Just how literal was he being? Paszek had ruled out De Klerk a while ago. And just how far back in his own life was this referring to? Who else was left? Hiram Salim? Again, doubtful. Maybe Danny Li wasn't such a terrible guess after all.
Back to Kane. Right back to her is where is mind had to go. She was probably on the run, probably a fugitive of the CIA. That meant Hall was probably still stuck in the Pentagon.
And the odds that either of them would enter that building again were staggeringly low.
Well, she was still alive, right? Technically? Assuming that, again, the Pentagon wasn't in a pile of ashes…
No, no, no. Kane was where he needed to stay. Safe, safe, safe, safe, safe…
She was finding help, biding her time. She was going to find him, same as she'd done to countless hostages. And he wasn't as disposable as those other hostages, right? Yes, yes, he was useful, he mattered…
Kane cared about him, right? Right? Yes, yes, yes…she had to. Wouldn't have stuck around for this long if she hadn't. Why was he doubting this? Desperate, too desperate…slipping…
The noise was too much. Getting to him. The DNI was always on. Always on. Always kept feeding him things, information. What was life like without one? He couldn't remember.
It hurt. It hurt far more than he had any idea it might. Wouldn't this be better? His thoughts had less means to torment him. They were duller, less visceral. But they were overflowing in volume. Thoughts and thoughts and worries and fears and worries and thoughts. No images, no documents, no objective information to find comfort in.
Bad things, bad memories. Not the ancient memories of patients before him. His and his alone. Where were the good memories? Did he have any? How much of what he considered good in his life was fantasy? False and implanted nothings?
That damn noise! Like grey paint being fired into his eyes with a pressure washer and his mouth was constantly filled to the brim with hot water.
And to what end?! He was bound and gagged already. He didn't need to submit. This was torture without purpose, without practical means. This wasn't some kind of sick fantasy…there were no cameras. The white noise would make sure of that.
KANE! He mentally screamed the name over and over in hopes it would drown out the infernal noise. Paszek didn't expect any relief, but he needed the semblance of struggle, a tug at the restraints, even a single millimeter of ground gained. And to no avail. The drowning would continue indefinitely. A rusted syringe sinking endlessly into his brain, until…
What?
Was that…
A clock? Why…why would something like that be here? Why now?
The white noise was getting softer. Softer…he could hardly hear it.
Tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…
And gone.
Kane had chosen to take refuge off the beaten path, taking her truck to a secluded forested area just east of Moorefield, West Virginia. She was bracing herself for a much longer conversation with Wes than she had initially planned. It wasn't something she could complain about, really. There wasn't a schedule to keep.
Cleveland was not a topic she had discussed with, well…anyone. And there was ample reason for that. It was not a matter of who she could trust. Paszek, she could trust. But he still didn't know, and again…that was for good reason.
There was a large, regrettable, cynical part of herself that told her that Wes had changed too much to be trusted. Told her there was no way he had gone the last decade without some additional tragedy, additional trauma that had sucked the optimism out of him.
And yet…
If she couldn't tell the truth to her oldest friend, what exactly was left inside of her?
"You remember Spencerport?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question.
"Implying either of us could ever forget…" Wes responded. "That was messed up."
Spencerport, of course, referring to the suburb of Rochester, New York, where thousands of residents and students, including herself, took place in one of the more notable sets of protests of the late 2050s.
"We had to do something, Wes. They were poisoning the fucking water supply. Too many Rochester kids just sat back and watched that happen knowing they get theirs from the Syracuse system, anyways…"
"If you-"
"I'm not accusing you of inaction. I know that you did everything you could. The point is, the feds got some…very clear footage of us while we were setting up the barriers around the fishery," said Kane.
"You mean the ring of flaming police cars?" Wes shot back.
Kane ignored the jab. "They put my name on a blacklist."
"That certainly explains why the FBI rejected you," said Wes. "Though I always thought you had just been a bit too verbose in your application essay."
Awfully light-hearted for someone who was threatening to call the cops on her a few minutes ago. Maybe this could go somewhere after all.
Kane wished that her radical anti-establishment actions were the whole of her past demons. That was more than forgivable – it was sympathetic, easy to understand. Much harder to stomach was what came after, not the things she merely participated in, but the things she caused, that she willed into existence for reasons nowhere near good enough to justify the ends.
The skeletons in her closet were large in number, yes, but also mortifyingly dense. A less rational person might mistake complexity in her misdeeds for ambiguity, but Kane knew better.
Misdeeds? Is that what she was calling them now? No, no, no, no…she was falling into that inescapable pit of excuses, of coping. She needed to stay above ground, above sea level, in the real, real world where her crimes against people, innocent and otherwise would damn her for the remainder of her life and perhaps beyond it. No one could tell her otherwise, and she was not about to let anyone try.
But priorities were priorities, and Sarah Hall wasn't waking up without a doctor.
"That does beg the question, though," said Wes. "If you really were on a blacklist, why did the CIA hire you? That doesn't track at all."
"I'm getting there," she replied. "Spencerport hardly had a police force. I remembered that before the National Guard showed up, most of the officers were Rochester PD. So, I sent a phishing email to one of their captains."
Wes gave a breathy sigh. "And it worked? What am I saying…of course it worked. It was you."
"Captain's email led me to the top of the department. Turns out that Rochester PD isn't just collaborating with the National Guard, they're being given extra funding from the FBI, of all places. Want to guess what they were using that money for?"
"Riot gear, military-level equipment, the usual," Wes responded quickly. "As well for PR support for suppressing media about the extrajudicial slayings of black men, I can only imagine."
Kane's voice grew more intense. "All those things and more. But they're more linked than you might be thinking. I asked myself 'why is the FBI funding these individual police departments? Isn't that way out of their jurisdiction?' And I had to go higher to find those answers."
"This is the part where you tell me you hacked the FBI. No need to tell me how, just get to the juicy bit, alright?" said Wes. Kane was feeling more confident about his loyalty by the second.
"President Zimmern started-"
"Best one we've had in a while. Not like that's saying much, though," Wes cut in. "Oh, uh, sorry for interrupting. Please continue."
"It's fine," she hurriedly replied. "So, Zimmern is putting pressure on the FBI to lead investigations against corrupt and overfunded PDs all around the country. Tells them to let heads roll, indict entire departments if they have to. Turns out, they don't want to imprison a few hundred thousand sets of additional eyes and ears. The FBI collaborates with governors and city council members to-"
"…to lower police budgets at the local level while secretly providing them with double the funding." Wes finished. "Rachel, this was all over the news. The Times published something close to a thousand pages of leaked documents. Why are you telling me all of this?"
Kane allowed herself to let a giant breath in and out.
"Because I was one who leaked them."
"Ignacio!"
No vision. He groaned as he struggled to get up from the floor…no. From the ground. This was ground, earth, grass. He was outside.
Where the hell was he?
"The posts, Ignacio! You've not worked long enough for a break!"
That voice…
Paszek's sight began to return. There was a man about five yards in front of him. Tall, a bit lumbering. He could barely make out a coarse beard.
This was his backyard.
As his vision settled in to the scenery, Paszek took notice of his clothes – a long-sleeve t-shirt and blue jeans. He hadn't worn anything like that in well over a decade.
"Leniwy chłopak! Pick yourself up!"
Paszek brought one up leg, then used both hands to steady it as he brought the other leg up and over. Grunting as he straightened himself, Paszek looked straight ahead and scowled.
Scowled at his father.
"Bring two more posts and grab the heavier pickaxe," his father spoke. The earth here is too compact."
Paszek hardly moved an inch, furrowing his eyebrows even more.
His father, having briefly turned around to resume his work of striking the dirt, turned back, now taking notice of Paszek's state of inaction.
"Are you really this surprised, Ignacio?" he mused. "Your…mind box is switched off. It had to be someone that your God-given brain already knew. You are smart, Ignacio, smart enough to make these connections…do better!"
"Alfons," Paszek said plainly.
"It matters not what you call me," replied Alfons. "But work must be done! This will all be over much quicker if you help me."
Paszek reluctantly swooped up two fenceposts in her right arm, dipping down to retrieve the pickaxe with his left. It was far heavier than he anticipated. Lopsided, he dragged himself over to Alfons and let the pickaxe hit the floor again.
Alfons extended his arms. Paszek understood the gesture and handed him both posts.
"You still build this fence every year?" Paszek asked, still clearly unhappy with the situation.
"Who is to say?" Alfons grunted, slamming the post into the narrow but deep divot he had made in the ground. "This might not be 2070. It could be ten years ago…twenty-five years...the future, perhaps."
Paszek swung the axe into the ground, making a small mark parallel to the other divots, where Alfons had already begun placing the fence posts.
"You know this is not real, yet you help your poor old father build his fence. Why?"
"You said it would make this end faster," Paszek spat.
"My knowledge, your knowledge…the same," Alfons replied. "Which means you didn't believe it until you heard me say it. Curious."
Paszek deepened his divot in the ground. The work was hard. Too hard. It had taken him this long to realize that his arms were flesh and bone instead of steel.
"Why are you making me do this?" Paszek groaned.
"You should be asking 'why am I doing anything else?'" Alfons quickly replied. "God has gifted you with intelligence, Ignacio. Use it! The soul holds many things, many thoughts, ambitions, insecurities…the fact that you are here should tell you that there's somewhere else you'd like to be even less."
"How terrible that memory must be," Alfons added.
"You really don't think the worst ones were caused by you?" Paszek asked. "I'm sure Mom would agree with me."
"You don't know what I think. Or what your mother thought. You're grasping at straws to make sense of your own mind – something that is senseless!" Alfons replied, driving another post in the ground inches away from Paszek's foot.
Paszek furrowed his eyebrows and began forming another small hole for the next post. "That's an indictment on you…" he grunted as he swung the axe again. "…not me."
"I tried to guide you into the path of righteousness. You chose a path of…excessive resistance," Alfons responded.
Paszek chuckled. "Yeah. That is exactly what you would say."
"What do you stand for, Ignacio? If not for God, if not for your fellow man, then what?" Alfons asked, inserting yet another post as he and Paszek continued their work.
"You're just trying to get me to questions things I don't need to be questioning. Throw me off, make me start panicking…" Paszek started.
Paszek allowed his axe to hit the ground clumsily before letting it go entirely; it fell sideways to the earth and left a puff of dirt in its wake.
"I am not gonna build your stupid fucking fence."
Alfons glared back. "You don't want to build the fence? Fine. There are other ways to occupy our time." He pointed over to the corner of the yard that faced the house, where a doghouse, perhaps 3 feet tall and 5 feet deep, stood in disrepair.
"Isaiah 57," Alfons said nonchalantly.
"Don't," replied Paszek, averting his gaze back towards the fence.
"Isaiah 57," he repeated, this time firmer.
Paszek shook his head just a few degrees in either direction.
"Isaiah 57!" Alfons shouted. "Now!"
Paszek gritted his teeth and shook his head faster. "No! I will not!"
Alfons kicked over a latent fencepost. "The righteous hath perished! And there is none laying it to heart! And men of kindness are gathered! Without any considering that from the face of evil gathered is the righteous one!"
"I won't! Not for you!" Paszek shouted back.
Alfons relented. "What's done is done, my son…"
With no warning whatsoever, Paszek was in the house. The doghouse.
He was back in the doghouse.
The interior was silent, as it always. How? Shouldn't he have heard the wind blowing outside? The rustling of leaves? Something? Yet by some miracle or profound feat of engineering, it was silent.
The size of the enclosure necessitated that he lie somewhere between prone and a fetal position. Based on how long his legs where, it should have been even worse. But his legs felt shorter than usual. It was dark, of course, but he could sort of see the outline of his arms, too. Thin. Too thin.
He was just a kid again.
What exactly was he in control of here? Certainly not his actions, as he was utterly frozen in place – not that the doghouse provided much in the way of wiggle room anyways. But what of his thoughts?
"You are right to fear yourself, Ignacio." His father's voice bounced aimlessly around the inside of the doghouse.
"Your mind understands things, understands realities that you have chosen to reject! Your faith is misconstrued, misplaced…you have damned yourself to Hell for all eternity! And for what purpose?!"
Paszek fruitlessly tried to shuffle himself around to block his ears with his hands. His elbows didn't have enough room to bend any more than twenty degrees. Not that it would have mattered.
"Whom are you mocking? At whom do you open your mouth wide and stick out your tongue? Are you not children of transgression, offspring of deceit? You who burn with lust among the oaks and under every green tree, who sacrifice your children in the wadis and under the clefts of the rocks?" Alfons bellowed, seemingly able to shout without pausing for breath.
Paszek knew those words. Isaiah 57. He hadn't forgotten. And not just because of his DNI. This was embedded in his head – his real mind, his real brain. He knew Isaiah 56 and 58, and Matthew 3 and 4 and 5 and 7 and Ecclesiastes 1 thru 11 and far too many of the Psalms to lists.
He knew them all for the same reason, and that reason was not piety.
"The Lord's Word is not cryptic, Ignacio! You are as the prophets described - you have transgressed, you have lusted, you have abandoned your faith, your principles! What do you have to show for it?"
Alfons paused.
"Every soul can be saved, my son. But your time is far shorter than you realize. Repent! Repent and you will be forgiven!"
"Shut the fuck up!" Paszek shouted. His voice was weak, unsupported. He didn't feel tired. But his voice held no power here.
Alfons seemed entirely unfazed. "Upon a high and lofty mountain you made your bed. You also went up there to offer sacrifice. Behind the door and the doorpost you have set up your memorial sign. For away from Me, you uncovered, went up and made your bed wide, and cut covenant with them. You loved their bed – you looked on their nakedness. You journeyed to the king with oil and multiplied your perfumes…"
There was plenty more scripture to go. And Paszek had no doubts he would be hearing most all of it.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" said Wes.
Kane stifled a huff. "That's hardly the response I expected from you, Wes. Give me that much." She felt one of eyes begin to water.
"You actually think that blood is on your hands? Honestly? Any honorable person would have leaked that info," he responded.
"That doesn't make it okay!" she hissed, trying her best not to raise her voice too much. "Forty-seven civilians. Kids! Fucking kids were there!"
"Those riots were justified, Rachel. Even more so than Spencerport. You can't hold yourself responsible for the actions of the police and the instigators! You just can't!"
"Well…" Kane muttered. "I do. I blame myself every single day and you're not going to stop me from doing that."
She paused.
"I've done so much worse," she continued, tears now starting to actually form. "I've lost count of how many people I've killed. And most of those people weren't shooting at me, either…"
Wes brought his voice to a near-whisper. "Rachel, you…you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to."
Kane pretended not to hear him. "They put me on asset retention councils. You know what those are?" she said. "It's when you sit down and decide whether someone is worth more to the CIA alive or dead."
She lowered her voice in volume, but raised it in intensity. "And the worst part is that you feel good about yourself the one time out of ten when you let them live. You feel like…like you've done something good! But that's not how it works! Good people don't do the things I've done!"
"It should never have been me…" She was blubbering at this point. "Asset retention is why I was with the CIA in the first place. It…it's why you didn't go to my funeral back in '59."
Wes remained silent.
"Do you get it know?" she wept into the phone. "Surviving, coping…whatever you want to call it…I've hurt a lot of people."
Kane sniffed in and regained about half of her composure. "But like I said, I'm not calling you so that you can help me. I'm calling so you can help save lives. Decent, innocent lives."
"You…" Wes started. "The CIA knew that you leaked the FBI docs?"
"They didn't offer me a job," Kane replied. "They placed me in a job. Saying no wasn't an option."
"I would say 'you could have told me this'…but…" Wes trailed off. "I guess it was never quite that simple."
Kane's voice started to break again. "It's not your job to pity me, Wes."
"And here I am, doing it anyways. We're both predictable."
Another silence. Kane had to try her hardest to not break it.
Wes took an audibly deep breath. "What do you need me to do?"
Clarity…confusion…intense noise and intense silence at the same time. Paszek's head was spinning.
The humming was gone. His DNI was back to normal. Was that what woke up him? How long was he asleep for? It felt like ages that he spent in the doghouse, but there was no way to know how much time had actually passed.
His eyes refocused themselves in time to see Savior walk into view and into the doorway.
"Some dream you seemed to be having, Captain."
Paszek shot him a defeated stare.
"I'm not here to judge. Perhaps it was therapeutic," said Savior.
Paszek didn't adjust his expression.
"Or perhaps not."
Paszek adjusted his sitting position and exhaled deeply. "You having fun here?"
"That's certainly not what I guessed your first words to me would be. But…no, not quite. I'm learning, though," replied Savior.
"Learning how to have fun?" Paszek coughed out. He tried his best to form a faint smile.
Paszek could see Savior glare at him through the mask. He had thrown him off his guard. Good. That would help him, maybe keep him alive for longer.
"In good spirits, I see. I suppose that's okay for now," said Savior. Maybe he wasn't quite as fazed as Paszek had hoped. He was still spinning, still coping, still looking for a little victory. Maybe it wasn't even really there.
"Should I even bother…" Paszek stopped to swallow. "…asking why you're doing this?"
"I'm not certain it would be worth explaining."
"Think I won't understand?" Paszek replied.
"Yes," Savior quipped.
"Try me," Paszek quipped back. "I've seen and heard some crazy…shit in my time. But I figure you already know about that already."
Savior cocked his head. "Pretend that I don't. Tell me the things you've seen."
"Self-important shitheads," spat Paszek. "Guys who think they can re-shape the whole world in their image with a couple of…bullets."
"You don't strike me as a scholar…but I think even you know that exact thing has happened more than once."
"Alexander, Hitler, Menendez…" Paszek replied. "They had armies. How many people do you have working for you? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?"
Savior took a step back and started pacing around. "I believe I've told you already that I find most bodies…unreliable. Loyalty is a staggeringly overrated ideal."
"You confuse me," Paszek stated, matter-of-factly. "You have monologued for a pretty long time now, and I still have no fucking clue what you stand for."
"Who says I have to stand for something?" Savior was now directly behind Paszek.
Paszek continued staring straight ahead. "Anyone who tries to blow up the CDC headquarters stands for something, whether they recognize it or not."
"My message on the news was clear, was it not?"
"A nuclear blast wouldn't release the pathogens in the lab. It would obliterate them," said Paszek. "You cooked up some kind of neurotoxin to kill Teele. Maybe you thought I'd assume it was from the CDC. But it's not, isn't it?"
Savior made his way back around to Paszek's front. "See…this is why I wanted you here. You're clever enough to figure these things out."
"Would you believe me if I told you that I didn't create any toxin? That someone else already had?" Savior posited.
"I guess so," said Paszek. "To be honest, you're a fucking mystery. I don't know what you do. Soldier? Explosives expert? Scientists? Regular Joe?"
"You're right in more ways than you know." Paszek just could see the outline of Savior's smile through his mask. "But I'll continue the mystery for now. It's more…storied this way."
Paszek had gone on the offensive a little. He zipped up for the time being. Maybe it was time to let Savior take the lead for a second.
"Storied?" he asked.
"It's rare that the whole of my obstacles is packaged into a single man," Savior replied, reaching onto his belt to unsheathe a small scalpel. "And for once, I have an opportunity to examine my obstacles with this level of…precision."
Savior nicked Paszek's left eyebrow with the scalpel. He hardly felt it.
"Torture?" Paszek scoffed. "You want information? I'll give you information. But I doubt there's anything useful I could tell you."
Savior brought the scalpel up to the minuscule wound that now existed and dug it in harshly, angling the blade to both deepen and widen the cut.
Paszek certainly felt that.
"I do not want information," Savior replied plainly.
"I would like to see you break."
"You…" Kane stammered. "I, uh…figured you would be a little madder at me for this."
"The way I see it…" Wes replied. "If you're lying to me, then I've got nothing left to live for, frankly."
Kane winced.
"But I don't think you are," he continued. "Which means, well…this is just the right thing to do."
Kane was back into business mode. "You remember the friend I mentioned when I called the last time?"
"With the DNI?" Wes replied.
"I have her with me in the back of my truck," Kane said nonchalantly.
"Okay…" Wes trailed off. "Where are you taking her? And why is she, uh, not sitting up front?"
"She's been in a medically induced coma for a few months," she responded. "I'm giving her oxygen and checking vitals on the hour. But I don't know where I'm taking her, yet. That's…actually where you could come in."
"Where are you right now?"
"I don't think it would be smart for me to tell you that, Wes," she replied.
"I don't have room in my apartment for a spare sleeping bag, let alone two fugitives," said Wes. "And Chicago is not a good place to hide."
"I'm not asking for that," she fired back. "I need equipment. Medical equipment. Oxygen, a heart monitor…a hospital bed, probably."
Wes exhaled through the phone. "You want me to what…call a mob doctor? The CIA will find your friend within hours if she's admitted to a hospital."
"Is there somewhere I can go that's not a hospital?"
"I'm really trying to help you here, but I'm not sure what kind of life you think I've been living for the last decade!" he shouted.
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry…" Kane reeled herself in. "Is there at least somewhere we could source some supplies from? Whatever we need to get her back in shape?"
"Fighting shape? Rachel, I still don't have much of a clue why you guys are on the run in the first place," replied Wes.
"I'm happy to explain more, Wes, but not right now." It was the truth. While Kane wanted to get as far away from D.C as possible, she couldn't aimlessly drive around the country. Eventually she would slip up. Get caught.
"Saw that the entire CDC building was evacuated the other day," chimed Wes. "You didn't have anything to do with that, did you?"
Kane huffed into the phone. "The person in that video, who killed that Swiss general…he set up a nuclear fucking warhead in there. Same guy might have just blown up the Pentagon and pinned it on me."
"I…what?" said Wes, dumbfounded.
"That's the kind of shit we're dealing with, okay?" said Kane. "I'm going to call you tomorrow at 8:00 your time. If you can't tell me where to go by then, you might not hear from me again, okay?"
"…Okay," he replied.
A beat.
"Wes?" she asked.
"Yeah?" he responded wearily.
"I'm so sorry."
There was nothing new in Savior's playbook. It was the basics. The barebones of physical torture that Paszek had dealt with about a half dozen times while training for the Seals. Nothing was unexpected or out of order. It was a routine cleaning at the dentist's office, torture-wise.
That didn't mean it didn't hurt like hell.
Savior was chattier than any reasonable enhanced interrogator would. The key word being "reasonable," since everything about him still made no sense. His logic bent backwards and sideways and sometimes morphed into a Mobius strip. Apparently, that was the point.
The point being…he doesn't have a point? How many layers of meta did Paszek have to strip in order to rationalize Savior? Too many. Far too many for their to actually be anything worthwhile at paydirt.
Maybe the answer was right on the surface. Maybe he really just is some mad genius who read one too many nihilist essays in his tweens.
The one thing that Savior had mucked up was that he wasn't giving him anything to drink. That made the first couple rounds of jumper cables not suck quite as much as they were supposed to. No puking.
He could just be playing the long game. But withholding water was a poor man's strategy. Paszek knew damn well that he had maybe another 18 hours before extreme dehydration set in. In his condition that meant nearly certain death. Relative to what else he'd been through, that was easy. He wouldn't break – he'd just die. Not the same thing.
Clearly, Savior had gained some idea of Paszek as being an ideological rival of some kind. And from where? Absolutely nothing about the man rang a bell, but Paszek couldn't shake the feeling that he'd met him somewhere. Know him, somehow.
He had run through the list in his head a hundred times. None of them made any sense. Hendricks? Dead. Salim? In custody, as far as he knew. Same went for Stephen Johnson. Danny Li did not have the means to be this subtle. Teele was dead as well. Hernandez and Winslow were both too small. Curran? Probably his best guess, but it still didn't all quite add up.
Paszek was starting to convince himself more and more that Savior was telling the truth when he said he didn't stand for anything. Nothing he said was of any substance, it was just self-indulgent. Was this all for fun? For sport?
Was Paszek insane for thinking that made more sense than anything real? Anything legitimate?
No, really. Just how insane was he?
Why should he believe that any of this was real?
He was just dreaming. Dreaming a vivid, vivid DNI dream full of the carnage he so deeply enjoyed and a whirlwind romance he never deserved. Intrigue, struggle, mindfuckery…just enough to keep him asleep but not enough to force him to wake up. Layers upon layers of virtual and neurological reality, each distinguishably less lucid than the one before it.
But how would he know when he reached the surface?
Whose life was he living? It didn't feel like his own. Not for years. Intrigue? Why did he think that? His life was dull. Dull and pointless. Monotony, rejection, these were the things that defined his life.
Why did he stop thinking about his best friend the day after he died?
Sure, his friend was a ruthless, uncompromising killer whose mental state had been gradually degrading for well over a year before his – if he was being honest with himself – timely death. But they were still friends. That was the result of necessity. They didn't have anyone else.
Well…
Paszek had someone else. But that was a recent development. And not at all related to said mental degradation.
Kane was a godsend. Circumstance brought them together and they made the most of it. They were wildly different people, but they had an understanding. One that they came to quickly. Instinctively.
Where had he heard that before? Where the fuck was he? Was he even alive?
The sound of Savior drilling into his ribcage didn't answer that question, mostly because he couldn't feel it at all.
To think that her biggest concern, of all things, was going to be air conditioning.
Despite not having the most well-defined plan for being a fugitive from the state, Kane did not anticipate moving much further South during her drive. The play was always for flyover country to be the beginning of her landing zone and for the Yukon to be the other end. The Pacific Northwest wasn't the best middle ground, but was probably doable. Portland?
John was from Portland.
But that didn't matter. She was South now. South by Southwest. The drive from Springfield to Arizona would take her less than two days under normal conditions. With Hall to worry about, maybe three.
Apparently Wes needed time to get this place set up, though, so she drove in arbitrary, unrecognizable paths to get there. Made the trip last a whole six days.
And so she rested on the seventh.
Kane knew the CIA well enough to know that they had virtually zero presence anywhere around Yuma. The drug trade had long fallen out of favor in the desert. It was just too damn hot and too damn inconvenient for anyone trying to do anything other than survive. She splurged for a hotel, with an "H" at the front and everything. After very casually hijacking the security systems at the place, she erased and replaced any potential footage of her carrying Hall's limp body into the building.
The fact that no one had plastered her face all over the news just yet was a mixed signal, she thought. On one hand, it could mean that Teele was giving her the benefit of the doubt. A chance to turn herself in? Amnesty? Doubtful, but possible. Or maybe, and most likely, the CIA had plans for her that didn't involve being recognized by the public.
Teele had assigned quite a high value to Kane. She knew that much of this value came from her connection to Paszek, but…maybe his plans bigger than him? He wasn't exactly the obvious choice for replacing the former Director, so it would be strange to think he had some master scheme cooked up years prior.
Did it even matter? It wasn't worth looking back. Time went forward and so did she. Yuma was forward. It would continue to be forward for however long it took to bring Hall back. And then forward would be wherever Paszek was. And then…
Kane was relieved to hear her phone ring.
"I got the lights on," Wes spoke.
"Temperature control?" she replied.
"Think it's kicking in just now. Set it 60 degrees. Fahrenheit, of course."
"Good. You have a place to stay the night?" said Kane.
"We used to keep some mattresses around here for that exact reason…" said Wes. "Bought a can of Febreze and some sheets. I'll be fine for now. But uh, listen…"
Kane furrowed her eyebrows. "Yeah?"
"I'm burning a hole in my pocket to keep the power turned on here. I had enough for the month, but if this is going to take any longer, I'm not sure I have enough outstanding favors to foot the bill."
Kane thought for a moment. "I might have a way to fix that."
"Winslow."
Kane heard her huff into the phone. "You…you got some nerve calling me! You, you…you vixen!"
"Take your hand off of whatever button you're about to press and hear me out," said Kane. "Assuming you're not in on this shit, too."
"Why don't you tell me exactly what you mean by that?" responded Winslow.
"Maybe you're just nice, Winslow. Or maybe Teele's paying you to spy on me. Either way, I think we can help each other a little bit."
"I…" Winslow stammered. "Director Teele is dead, ma'am."
That was news to her.
"Who's in charge now, then?" asked Kane.
"Well next in line is Curran. Too bad he's dead, too. Maybe our Chief Intelligence Officer would know. Unfortunately, she's dead as well. At least, we think so. It was difficult to identify the bodies," Winslow spat.
"You really think I did this?" Kane queried.
"You or your boyfriend," Winslow snapped back. "Probably the two of you working together. I had the answers all right in front of me. My fault I didn't see it sooner."
"Paszek told me he was going to confront you about your assignment preferences. I advised him not to lay into you too hard. He probably didn't listen to me, did he?"
Winslow lowered her voice. "Why don't you ask him yourself?"
"He's missing," Kane responded. "I assume kidnapped by Sav…by the masked man. I haven't killed anyone, the only reason I'm on the run is so I can find him."
"And what exactly does Specialist Hall have to do with that?" asked Winslow.
"She was a prisoner without trial. I freed her. They bump up your security clearance that quickly?"
"I have my ways," Winslow responded. "And the FBI guy you tased remembered your face."
"My point exactly," chimed Kane. "Why would I leave him alive if I had just killed the bigwigs? Teele was up to some shady shit but I wouldn't assassinate him in the Pentagon. You know I'm not that stupid."
A silence.
"Find your friend's email and look at the conversations they had about Paszek. And about Russell Pond. If you're not willing to help, don't bother calling. You can't trace this number and I'm not telling you where I am. If you believe the things you read in my reports…you'll know I didn't set off those explosives."
Winslow started to stammer another response, but Kane clicked her phone shut before she could hear any of it. This was a second waiting game to play.
She had allies out there. She just needed to get them to realize it.
Paszek did not dream this time.
Had he fallen asleep due to the infernal EMP noise, or just general drowsiness, perhaps he might have. But passing out from blood loss, which is what he assumed happened, didn't leave much room for dreams.
All the better, he thought. Some actual rest.
Two things had changed in the amount of time he was unconscious. One, that his chair had been removed, and that he was sitting upright on the floor, fixed in place by the fact that his limbs, once again, were locked by the EMP. Second, and more surprisingly, all of his wounds had been properly bandaged and cleaned.
Why?
Paszek was well aware that much of the psychology of torture relied on the festering – the uneven but constant degrading of the body and the mind. Why reset the clock?
Maybe Savior's goal was to get diminishing returns? To frustrate him? It aligned somewhat with his perceived set of morals…maybe? He really didn't know what to think about it. Or about anything, really.
As if to respond to his queries, Savior emerged from the dim light in front of him.
"I imagine you're confused about the bandages," said Savior.
"How kind of you," Paszek bit back.
"Well…" Savior started. "They're not exactly for your benefit."
Paszek lost his nerve. "What?"
"Your words, your speaking…they have merit. But I want something a bit less…filtered," responded Savior, taking a few steps closer to Paszek.
No. No. This was not happening. He couldn't go out like this. Not now…not ever. He needed more time. He couldn't let this happen. He couldn't end up on the other side of…
Savior advanced further and placed a cool, metallic hand on Paszek's cheek.
Not on the other side of an interface.
Oh sheesh, y'all, twas' a cliffhanger. See ya when I finish the next chapter.