The Guy in Second Place

Part Two

The Middleman still didn't like sleeping in the big bed without Wendy. He could tolerate it, though. The darkest parts of his subconscious were beginning to believe that they had a true bond, that the sexual connection wouldn't suddenly fade for her. Harder yet, beginning to believe fate wasn't setting him up for the Hell of losing her entirely. She wasn't fickle. And in spite of her slight build, she wasn't fragile. He could sleep, the nights she spent at her sublet. He could even look forward to the rediscovery after missing each other a little.

Wendy had said once, when they first came together, that being partners in bed as well as battle felt like every boundary between them had disappeared. He'd defined himself for so many years by his limits, the parts of his life he'd set aside to do his duty better. Letting go of that now was ... nothing in the world like scary.

He woke from a doze at the first flash of the lights by the communication screen. A yellow strobe; not a crisis, but worth getting him out of bed to deal with. "What is it, Ida?" he muttered.

"There's a data search buzzing through the 'Net with your name on it," Ida said. As a robot, she looked as good -- or bad -- as she did at any hour of the day or night. "And I do mean your name. Started at the Pentagon, working outward. The Middleman before you put out some misinformation when you hired on, but I don't know how well it will hold. Whoever's come knocking is good, maybe as good as me. Now ask me where Mr. Snoopy is working out of, I dare you."

He was fully awake now, and didn't need to. "FATBOY."

"You want my opinion, missy's ex-honeybun wants her back. I told you he needed a free trip to Greenland if you two were going to do the horizontal mambo. Which, let me go on record, is still gross."

I didn't ask your opinion. Ida read his expression through the communications screen and stopped. The Middleman shook his head. "Tyler Ford is an unlikely suspect. He's never shown stalker personality traits -- or that level of computer expertise, more to the point -- no matter how aggrieved he feels."

"Meatbags." Ida shrugged off the foibles of human behavior. "Either way, FATBOY's got more information than you like. Could be somebody wants to hold your old algebra teacher hostage, if they realize you're soft enough to fall for it. Could just want to shake things up between you and the tootsie."

His past life had ugly things in it, especially if they came to Wendy whole and unexpected. There was only one answer to that. "Pull my dossier together, all of it. If she's going to learn about my past, I should be the one who tells her." She's true as steel, she won't change her mind. His stomach was churning with old guilt anyway.

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Tyler woke with soft, instrumental jazz in his ears. He disconnected the under-the-pillow speaker from his up-to-the-second, full-featured U-Master. At the simplest level Manservant Neville's signature product was a straightforward, if oversized, MP3 player with video capacity. The difference was the two-way interface. U-Master headphones, either standard or Bluetooth, unobtrusively kept track of the user's blood pressure, heart rate, and brain activity. The information went back to the main U-Master and modified its choice of 'random shuffle' music and video.

A user who took ten minutes giving his unit custom settings would get cheerful music when he was depressed, energizing music when he exercised, calming music when he was drifting off to sleep. Users who tweaked the settings in more detail could create their moods to order, through the U-Master, instead of simply reinforcing them. You saw people on the street all the time, these days, who clearly used their units 24/7. Give your life a soundtrack, just like the ad said. And the processor had plenty of capacity to expand. U-Master had made worldwide headlines, six months ago, when a high-end prototype had detected a heart attack in progress and saved its user's life by sounding an alarm. The medical division wasn't quite ready to ship products yet, but they already had millions of pre-orders.

Tyler's knuckles ached. As he massaged them, he mulled over how he'd spied on Wendy last night. That felt weird. But damn it, her sudden switch to that guy still didn't make any sense. Tyler loved her, the real thing. He'd thought she loved him too. He needed to keep an eye on her, like he would for any good friend, and see if she'd flaked out into real trouble. He turned on his home computer and called up the webcam feature of his new spy gear. He automatically put on his Bluetooth headset and tuned it to his U-Master as he began working.

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Wendy came to work after a night at home -- although 'work' and 'home' weren't exactly the categories, not any more -- in the fancy-occasion outfit she'd worn the evening before. Somehow, her choices of clean clothes had been down to that or emergency last-outfit-before-laundry-day sweats. Her clothes were migrating without her planning it. The alien super-automato-clothes-cleaner beats the hell out of the washers in the basement, even if they didn't eat our quarters half the time. She grabbed a fresh uniform in the locker room. The thing would never look stylish, even with her modifications, but it was pretty comfortable.

The Middleman was in the control room when she wandered in, working at one of the equipment consoles. No, pretending to work. His incredibly-brave-in-the-face-of-death nerves had a habit of deserting him in icky social situations. Something like that had come up, or Wendy didn't know a thing about him.

Ida, on the other side of the room, was ignoring her existence again. And scariest of all, there was a steaming cup of coffee on the main conference table waiting for her. Wendy went for the caffeine. "All the world's dolphins have just evacuated from the planet," she guessed. "The Death Star is nearly within firing range. The sun has turned green."

"Nothing so pyrotechnic," he said. "The truth is it's ... personal, or at least one facet of it is. Someone inside FATBOY Industries is conducting an intensive data search -- it could hardly be more intensive without a HEYDAR of their own -- on our organization and me in particular." He looked embarrassed at using the pronoun. "The Middle secrets are well guarded, that shouldn't be a problem. But personal information, including classified military files ... they've drawn out a complete picture of my life up to joining the Middlemen. Which raises the question of why they want that information."

"It's the wanna-be," Ida stated. "Wanna be back in your pants, cupcake. I guess he's going for blackmail." The Middleman flinched a little; he had something to be blackmailed with, then.

"I'm not certain of Ida's interpretation," he said. "Mr. Ford's motivations aside, FATBOY as an institution has its own red flags. The majority of their business appears to be legitimate consumer goods, but the sheer speed of the company's growth is atypical. They were a small-scale electronics manufacturer ten years ago."

"And now Bill Gates trembles in his sneakers, got it." Wendy tried to keep her tone light. "But that's just the U-Masters; they're cheap and stylin' and fun. Don't tell me you of all people are against the free market rewarding innovation."

The mild teasing didn't change his tense expression. "Have you ever owned a U-Master?"

"I tried Lacey's after she first got it. Gave me a splitting headache. Apparently they really have to be one per person, if you're going to use the custom setups. So I got an Xbox. I like to manage my moods the old-fashioned way, by shooting zombies." She pantomimed a gun.

"Ida is counter-searching the origins and inner workings of FATBOY," the Middleman said. "It's taking time; their firewalls are impressive. This focus on my past is troubling. I have no close living relatives, Dubbie, and few friends who know I'm still alive. If blackmail is a motive here, it's aimed straight at you. My ... preference for anonymity, above and beyond what the role of Middleman requires, may have outlived its usefulness."

His expression was as blank as he could make it -- more guarded than she'd seen even in the heat of battle. He wouldn't look her in the eye. Wendy noticed another object on the table near her coffee, a file folder bulging with papers. Everything he'd hidden behind silence and duty and half-humorous evasions, stacked in one place. This kind of naked doesn't suit you. Stripped down at gunpoint, more like.

"We are not doing this," Wendy said harshly. "Some kind of damn Dr. Gil confession session, all freakin' emo. I'll read that stuff if you want. Sometime. But I know you, the you you are now. And I figured out a long time ago, you wouldn't be wound up this tight unless you were afraid of some part of you cutting loose. You having secrets is no big secret." She drew a shaky breath, tried for a flippant tone. "So, did you kill anybody? Other than bad guys in the line of duty, I mean."

That shook him, in a good way; he looked a fraction more human. "More by luck than good intentions, but no."

"Treason, hijacking an aircraft, recording baseball games without express written consent?"

Ida laughed. "Maybe the reefer kid does have something going for her."

"Are you married to somebody?" That came out a little sharper than Wendy had intended.

He met her eyes directly this time; it warmed her, body and soul. "Engaged, never married," the Middleman said quietly.

"Okay, then." Wendy finished her coffee. "Work. Threepio thinks it's Tyler, using his FATBOY insider mojo for a personal grudge. I'd hate to think that. He's no more like that than you are. So maybe it's the opposite. Maybe FATBOY's using him. That was weird how he met Neville, crashing a car ten yards from where we were getting hot dogs."

"We have real-time holo of that, from your Middlewatch." His voice had recovered its normal resonance; Wendy was glad she'd turned down his confession. "Ida, let us see it." The robot snarled and pushed buttons. Wendy of two months ago moved across the main video screen, held hands with Tyler (Wendy-today winced a bit), talked music and bought hot dogs. She chatted with the vendor, oblivious, while a minor car accident happened behind them and turned into a scuffle. "Sensei Ping has training exercises for improving peripheral vision," the Middleman remarked. "We can go over those again."

"Thanks for the tip, Captain Gangster," Wendy snarled, half serious.

Wendy on screen noticed the fuss and went to help. They had better video, and clear audio, for Tyler's first conversation with his erstwhile boss. "No police report, no significant damage, no consequences to the man who attacked Neville," the Middleman said. "The incident could have been staged easily by a group with FATBOY's resources. What are the chances that a man in Neville's position would be crossing the city completely alone, not a secretary or a bodyguard in sight?"

"Lacey said he had two big flunkies in suits when he turned up at the loft," Wendy said. "I suppose he could have gotten scared by nearly getting beaten up, and changed his habits." Her tone gave the idea zero credence.

He nodded. "Or he could have left the bodyguards home so a Good Samaritan could save him. It's hard to imagine your Tyler meeting Manservant Neville face-to-face in any other situation."

Not mine. She didn't say it. "He barely went for the offer as it was. Well, you did say Tyler was sharp enough to do our job. That potential has to qualify him for other things, if somebody knew he had the mojo in the first place." Another train of thought caught Wendy's attention. "That squishy-monster, the first day we met; you knew it was going to happen. You knew who I was before I got that temp assignment."

"The mutant outbreak was perfectly genuine," the Middleman said, too innocently. "It was impossible to intervene before the creature appeared. But given that context ... influencing your temp agency so that you were on the scene was perfectly justifiable. Someone less capable would have been sitting at that desk, if you weren't, and that bystander would have been in far more danger."

"Also you got to test my moves before I knew it was a test," Wendy said. "One of these days I'm going to kick you in the shins. Anyway. You were watching me as a prospect. You were watching him too. Did you see anybody else watching him at the same time?"

"Brain cell number three goes into action," Ida said. "Not bad, actually." Her eyes went blank. "Nope, nothing in the surveillance reports. We quit looking at him when you didn't get killed first mission out of the box. Personally, I think we gave up too soon."

"Love you too, Ida," Wendy shot back. "If you or I tried to talk to Tyler about this -- about anything -- he'd tell us to go to hell."

"He'd also report the entire conversation to Manservant Neville, if FATBOY is using him," the Middleman said. "Nothing could make this situation worse."

Ida raised her head. "I've got something."

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He seemed so normal, the neighbors would be saying a few hours later. No one had any idea he'd hurt a fly.

He couldn't remember, now, when the plan had started taking shape in his mind. He had every detail perfect. Three different rifles for different ranges, boxes of reloads laid out in neat order, distances marked in his mind. The pistol for the last act, when they came for him; he wasn't worried about that. He wouldn't have set up his sniper's nest in his own house if he was. He wanted them to know who he was. Besides, the terrain was too perfect to pass by. The attic window twenty-five feet off the ground. Only a few yards farther out, at the edge of his side yard, the sharp drop-off that marked the edge of the subdivision gave him another several yards of altitude. And the new elementary school, close to the cliff as if no one in California had ever heard of mudslides, only a few dozen yards further on. At this elevation he had God's own view of the whole place, including the complete absence of cover between the main building and the playground.

His U-Master was full of a dozen genres of music; nihilistic punk, death metal, folk tunes about blood and righteous revenge from the world's longest-running civil wars. He set the headphones to mood enhance with the same care he'd taken with all his other tools, selected a rifle. He'd show them. All of them.

The music tangled and sizzled in his mind, volume soaring all by itself. He braced on the windowsill for the first shot. He tried to hold onto his rage, channel it, but the box was twisting it. Bringing up the self-hate that was only a hair's width below the surface anyway. His fingers wouldn't support the rifle. He tried to claw for the headphones but they wouldn't do that either; it was all too much. His brain was hot, heavy agony as if his skull were full of molten lava. He convulsed from the pain. Everything his hands hit, the boxes, the other rifles, his sniper's perch, intensified the hurt as if it were red-hot iron.

Only one cool, pain-free surface in his entire hellish world; the grip of his last-ditch pistol. It felt smooth, comforting; the only possible source of peace. His shoulders bumped against the sill of the open window and it was cool too, like spring water. He arched his back, leaning far out, bringing up the pistol like it was the only drink of water in a burning, burning world. His last emotion, balancing on the edge, closing his finger on the trigger, was profound relief.

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