Arch Enemy (37 page)

A
lex sped down I-95 on her used Honda Interceptor. Being on the back of a bike again felt even more like freedom than being able to walk without crutches. It was like flying after a lifetime on the ground.

“Slow down,” her dad said through the portable communicator he had bought for them. It wasn't the sort of thing Zeta used, but it was enough for them to talk as they drove. “You're leaving me behind.”

“How about you keep up?”

They made the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the early afternoon and stopped at a roadside diner before moving into the city. Alex set her computer on the table and ran the tracking program on Simon. “Looks like they're on the move,” she said, tilting Coca-Cola into her mouth as ice tinkled in the glass. “In the vicinity of the National Mall.”

Her father sipped at a mug of coffee. “Their target could be any number of locations.”

Alex checked her watch. “We still have five hours until . . .”

“Let's go after them,” he said. “Keep the computer open in the car. You work support. I'll get Simon.”

T
he shadows of trees were lengthening with the sun's afternoon descent. Praetorian's family home was as old money as old money got—a red brick colonial mansion in Brookline overlooking some serious acreage of the most expensive square feet in the region. Lily pushed the iron gate, which opened with a squeal. She walked up to the oak doors and operated the heavy iron knocker fashioned to look like the head of a lion.

An aged Korean man opened the door. Servant, by his clothes.

“We don't wish to buy anything,” he said, in a shaky accented voice, and pushed the door closed.

Lily put her foot down to block the door, which knocked against her toes. She winced with pain.

“Wait! I need to talk to you about Jeongwoo. It's an extremely important matter.”

“There is no Jeongwoo here,” he said, but his face betrayed his dismay at hearing the name. “Now please, remove your foot.”

“It's a matter of life and death.”

“Go away,” said the servant. “I do not know what you are talking about. Whatever this is, we want nothing to do with it. Go now before I call the police.”

Lily withdrew her foot and the old servant closed the door, its mass emphasizing the finality of his dismissal.

She turned to go, mind working on how she'd gain access to what she needed. She assessed the windows for how easy they would be to break in. They might be alarmed, but these houses frequently didn't extend the alarm to the highest windows. It would be trivial to gain access to the backyard, and perhaps she could scale a tree to—

“Stop!”

A female voice, meek and beseeching. She turned to see a beautiful Korean woman, not much older than Lily herself, with long, lustrous black hair, wearing a silk dress—and she looked like the kind of person who would wear silk just to sit around the house.

She came close, obscuring herself from the house windows behind a massive pine tree.

“You were asking about Jeongwoo?” she said.

“Yes, I was.”

“Are you against him?”

“What?”

“Is he your enemy?”

Lily didn't know how to play this. But she sensed that the right answer was the truth.

“Yes. He's putting people in danger. I want to stop him.”

“There is a diner about two miles down the road. Meet me there in half an hour. I have something to show you.”

“H
e's on the far side of the Washington Monument,” her father said. “Intercept him on your right.”

“Copy.”

Alex pulled the hood of her sweater over her eyes as she power-walked over the frozen ground. She caught sight of Simon ahead and steered to converge with him. Her mind worked on the problem of how she would make contact.

She opted for ramming him, playing it like she was a distracted pedestrian, hard enough for him to drop his backpack. He gasped as it hit the ground.

“Hey, watch where you're . . .” He trailed off as he registered who she was.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, picking up his backpack. It was heavy—must be the bomb. “I was distracted, I—” she brought her mouth close to his ear. “I need to know how your leader communicated with the Legion.”

“He's got a special phone on him at all times.”

“Can you point him out to me?”

“I'm meeting him now,” Simon whispered.

“When's the attack?”

“Tomorrow, nine a.m.” Then, in a loud voice: “Watch where you're going next time. Idiot.”

Alex continued her earlier trajectory. “Dad,” she said. “Did you hear?”

“I heard,” he said. “Circle back and stay on him. Don't be seen. Remember like I taught you.”

She did remember. She kept her distance, walking at a slight angle to Simon so that no one watching them would have connected the two. She averted her eyes, using only her peripheral vision to track him, and feigned interest in the landmarks that surrounded the National Mall. Alex followed him as far as the Smithsonian before he stopped to talk to another man—short and stocky, with a short-cropped beard and a flattop of black hair.

“I got him,” said Alex.

“I see it,” Morgan said. She looked around, spotting, to her surprise, that her father had been stalking her. He passed her without making eye contact, and she took the cue not to acknowledge him.

She watched out of the corner of her eye as she pretended to consult a bulletin board. He approached the man talking to Simon, timing his passage to the approach of another couple of pedestrians. He swerved to avoid them and bumped into the cell leader, so softly that it might not even merit an apology.

“I got it,” said her father. “I got his phone.”

T
he Korean woman entered the diner with an elegant bearing. Lily stood as the woman looked around and, catching sight of her, walked over and sat down

“Thank you,” she said. “I was afraid you wouldn't come.”

The best kind of asset—the kind that thinks she's more interested in you than you are in her. “I want to know what you have to show me. I'm Lily, by the way. Lily Harper.”

“My name is Minsoo,” she said. “Jeongwoo was—is my brother.”

Lily had gathered as much—not mistaking the family resemblance, “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

She shook her head. “I have not seen him in many years. He is not welcome in our house.”

“Why?”

Minsoo looked away. “He made my childhood hell,” she said. “He was cruel, but he knew how to hide it well. He never left a mark. Never let it show. My parents adored him because he was so intelligent. But all the while, he would hurt me. Torture me, physically and mentally. Threaten me in my bed at night. Tell me awful things. I never had a pet that he did not kill and leave for me to find. But I could never tell my parents. Every time I tried, he hid all evidence—and made sure I was punished for it later.”

Lily couldn't help noting the elegance of Minsoo's speech. It was precise and measured, with no sign of haste or hesitation, with only a touch of an accent, which if anything lent her speech class.

“My parents continued to be deluded until he was ten years old. The family dog, a happy little basset hound, was found murdered with garden shears. This time, one of the servants saw him and told my parents. They denied it, but they couldn't. Their son was a monster.”

The waitress came and offered them menus. Minsoo thanked her with the utmost politeness and asked for a bottle of mineral water.

“They tried to fix him. They hired the most expensive psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists. They wanted a name for what he had and a way to get rid of it. They got him specialized tutors, and then veered into quacks—psychics, so-called shamans, exorcists. Whoever would promise to change what was wrong with Jeongwoo. Of course, nothing ever worked. It was his nature that was wrong.”

She kept her delicate white hands on the table, her long slender fingers ending on fingernails manicured with a skin tone nail polish.

“Jeongwoo had always been a gifted child, but in his teenage years he became frighteningly intelligent. He also knew people. He treated them like experiments. He tormented anyone he came in contact with—mostly staff, since my parents did not let him out of the house very often. All learned to avoid him.”

The waitress set down the bottle of Evian and a glass. She poured. Minsoo waited and thanked her when she was done. She resumed her story once the server was out of earshot.

“We had a maid at the time—Joonyoung was her name. My father found her dead one day—I won't tell you the details, it is too awful. That was the last straw. My father spent a lot of money to cover it up. A gardener took the blame. He ended up dying in prison.

“To Jeongwoo, my father offered two options. He could go to an institution for as long as father deemed reasonable—and I can tell you now, it would have been the rest of his life—or he could leave and never come back. He chose the latter. I haven't heard from him since, and I thank the heavens every day that I don't.”

Lily felt for her. She had undergone a fraction of that—the cruelty of the girls at her prep school, days of hiding in the bathroom and crying. That alone had made her life miserable. To have her tormentor be her brother, an inescapable presence from such a young age . . .

“I have something for you,” said Minsoo. She pulled a phone from her pearl-encrusted clutch. She manipulated the screen with a slender finger and turned it for Lily to see.

It was a video. It bore the discoloration of something that had once been on tape. The frame showed a boy. Korean. About puberty. He was sitting on a chair. A fern sat in the otherwise drab background.

“Jeongwoo?”

Minsoo nodded. Lily saw the resemblance.

A voice came from off-screen, with the impersonal warmth of a psychiatrist. “Why did you do what you did to the dog?

“I like it when things die,” he said.

“Is that why you killed him?”

“He was annoying.”

“Do you think about killing often?”

He didn't answer.

“Do you think about killing a lot, Jeongwoo?”

“All the time.”

Minsoo stopped the video there.

“He's a psychopath,” Lily said.

“It shows at an early age,” said Minsoo. “It did for Jeongwoo.”

“Why are you showing me this?”

“Because it's what I have to offer. Because if I can help you find him, catch him, whatever you intend to do, then I will. I want him dead, you see. And if this brings him a little closer to that death, then I do it happily.”

A
lex and Morgan had to drive a ways out of the city to find the type of motel they were looking for. All the chain places required ID and credit cards. They had to cross into Maryland before there was a place that would take them.

Alex unlocked the room for her father and set the bag from the electronics store on the table. He set the laptop they had brought along next to it, and then the phone he had stolen from the Legion cell leader.

She pulled the cable from the bag and connected the phone to the computer, which did its usual scratchy noise with the hard drive as it tried to interface. Meanwhile, her father called Scott, Lily's nerdy squeeze (verdict: cute, but not Alex's type).

“Scott,” he said. “We're connected.”

“All right,” he said on speakerphone. “Let me see what I can do.”

Her father sat back on the chair. He was getting tired, Alex could tell. Eyes droopy, muscles tense. She wondered if his bandages needed redressing.

“I've got something for you to see in the meantime,” Scott said. “I'm sending it to your screen.”

A video popped up. Sitting on the bed, Alex leaned forward to get a better view. A child, sitting in a chair. The voice, cold and affectless, unnerved her, even more coming from a child. It was Praetorian, no question. “I guess this is what Centurion was talking about,” her father said. “How's it going with the cell phone?”

“I can tell you one thing: I'm not going to be able to get a contact list or anything like that,” he said. “All communications are obscured via public-private key. There's just no way, unless we had a hundred years or got a quantum supercomputer.”

“How can we get one of those?”

“We'd have to invent one.”

The video came to an end. An idea came to Alex. “Scott, can you use the phone to relay a message to all the cell groups, even if you don't know who they are?”

“Could be. I'd have to isolate the—it would take a while. But in principle, it should be possible.”

“Prep the video,” her father said, quick on the uptake. “We're sending it to everyone in the cells, along with a message.”

“I see,” said Scott. “You want them to turn on him once they know what he is. You know, realistically, we can't expect everyone to come forward.”

“We just need one person in each cell group,” said her father. “Just one person to turn after they see this video and tell somebody the location of their cell and what their target is.”

M
organ woke up to his phone ringing. Scott.

He stood up, looking at his daughter, fast asleep in the other bed. It was still dark out. He looked at the time—6:32. Another forty-five minutes till sunrise. The weight of this day was already bearing down on him.

He went into the bathroom to pick up so he wouldn't wake up Alex. “Morgan.”

“I've been up all night, but I got it,” Scott said. His voice sounded breathy and exhausted. “I've written a protocol that'll deliver a message to the entire network of cells—every individual member.”

Morgan looked in the room. Alex stirred but was still in bed.

“All I need,” Scott continued, “is the message. Type it up for me and I'll get it sent.”

“Good. I'll do that. How's O'Neal coming with the identities of the sleeper agents?” If the diversionary attacks were to happen in a few hours, he had to assume the sleepers were going to strike later that same day.

“Hold on.” Too far to make out the words, Morgan heard Scott's voice, and then O'Neal's response. “She says don't bother her while she's working. Get the message written. I'll send you something as soon as I can.”

Morgan sat down at the table and opened the computer. The message had to be short and to the point—anything else might risk losing their attention. He typed,