There's Only One Quantum (12 page)

“Die,” he said, softly.

She gently touched his cheek. “Are you feeling okay, Mr. Coe? Maybe this business with the guns has got you feverish...”

He scanned her from head-to-toe. There was no mistake. It was Carmen—the same Carmen who moments ago was cut down in a hail of bullets.

“About Mr. Orton,” he said. “Agents of chaos...the rebellion...”

“It won’t be televised,” she said, grinning. “But you will have a front row seat.”

She stopped the elevator. She knelt down and opened the tiny door beneath the control panel. She removed a neatly folded similar black rain coat and fedora. “You’ll need to put this on.”

“Why?”

“It’s raining.”

He unfolded the coat and slipped into it. He put on the hat, as well. Both fit perfectly.

“Forty-six,” she said.

The doors opened to the outside. They were in an alleyway. “This is
Forty-six?
” he asked.

He stepped out into the rain. The elevator had seemingly opened from a brick wall.

Carmen cleared her throat. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He turned back to her. She was holding the attache case with the special assassin’s gun inside.

He took it from her. “How did you—”

“Get your gun?” She smiled. “Someone has to remember these things for you.”

She leaned in, kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Remember, I’m on your side,” she said, softly.

He felt a pin-prick in his arm. He immediately pulled back. He sensed someone behind him.

“It’s for your own safety...” she said.

And then the world turned dark.

Eleven.

—And the test scores continue to plummet. At one time, kids in this country were at least ‘somewhat’ comparable to the Asians and Indians...now Third-World countries and even Martian kids are out-performing them in these so-called ‘aptitude’ tests.

-You sound skeptical, Caller.

—I wanna know what’s on those tests. I wanna know why kids on Mars are scoring in the upper percentiles while our kids aren’t even in the game.

—Dr. Greenblatt, perhaps you can answer the caller’s question? For those of you just tuning in, our guest today is Dr. Cynthia Greenblatt, an Associate Professor of Dysgenics at Stanford, and author of the new book,
Why Little Bobby is Distracted by Shiny Objects or How Dumb Begets Dumberer
...

—Thank you for having me, Hal. I’m a fan of your show...

Coe awakened. He was in a strange bed, in a strange room. The walls were bare, white. The room had one door and one window. The window was open. A pair of plain, brown curtains fluttered and danced in the breeze. Coe could hear the patter of constant rain.

“Back among the living, I see.”

Coe turned toward the voice. It was Carmen. She sat in an armless chair, her legs crossed, her shoe—as usual—dangled from her toes.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in a nondescript room, in a nondescript building that looks out onto an ordinary city street,” she said, matter-of-factly.

His mouth was dry. Without being prompted, Carmen leaned toward him and offered him a glass of water.

He hesitated before accepting it.

“It’s a perfectly fine glass of water,” she said.

He sipped it. It did not taste out of the ordinary. It was cold. He finished it before speaking again.

“You drugged me,” he said, “after I trusted you.”

“I feel terrible about that,” she said. “But—”

“There really was no other way,” Locksley said, emerging from the door.

Behind him, Shackleton followed. He said, “We feared if you saw us again, you might not come cooperatively.”

“And so much depends on your full and complete cooperation, Mr. Coe,” Locksley said.

“You’re working with them?” Coe said to her. “What about your rebellion?”

“The rebellion has many layers,” she said.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Coe said. “You two are counsel for Quantum. You protect the company’s interests. She,” he said pointing to Carmen. “Or someone who looks just like her, was just in an all-out gun battle with Quantum security—and, she’s part of a movement to bring down the entire system.”

“Hence,” she said, smiling. “The many layers. But you, Mr. Coe, are my primary concern. I’m here to ensure your rights are protected.”

“Somehow I’ m not sure I believe you.”

“Don’t be so quick to dismiss her,” Locksley said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Shackleton did the same. “She speaks the truth.”

“We’ve entered into a somewhat delicate arrangement with Carmen’s faction,” Locksley said.

“You’ve entered into an agreement with a party bent on Quantum’s destruction?”

“We’re joined in a mutually beneficial intent: the assassination of Arturio Golden.”

“Who,” Locksley said, tugging back his sleeve to check his watch, “will soon be exiting onto the rooftop of the building on which this window opens upon. Is that proper grammar?” he asked Shackleton.

“Close enough. He gets the message.”

“Golden’s in the building across the street?” Coe asked.

“It’s the apt of his mistress, Bambi Norcross,” Carmen said.

“Delightful name,” Locksley said.

“If you’re going to have a mistress,” Shackleton said with a smirk.

“This is where you want me to do it?” Coe asked.

Locksley said, “He will emerge from the elevator, walk seventeen feet across the rooftop to the hoverpad, and enter the very new, very expensive, hovercar parked atop it.”

Shackleton said, “We’ve measured it out. You will have exactly 9.7 seconds to find him in the scope, center the cross hairs on his head or over his heart—your choice—and squeeze off a shot. If you miss, you will have exactly 1.3 seconds to fire again, before he senses he’s been shot at and runs for the hovercar.”

“And what if I fail? What if I miss?”

Both Shackleton and Locksley smiled. “Don’t miss, Mr. Coe,” they said. “Remember: we will have a gun pointed at you, as well.”

“One of you?”

Locksley laughed. “Oh, no. Like we’ve said before. We don’t get involved in the nasty stuff.”

“We’re lawyers,” Shackleton said.

“Then who?”

“Me,” Carmen said, flatly.

Twelve.

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“You’ll shoot me if I don’t follow through with this?”

Coe was sitting in the chair, facing the window, sniper rifle assembled and resting in his sweating palms. Carmen stood beside him, .45 in hand, lightly pressed to his temple.

“That’s the idea,” she said.

Locksley and Shackleton had left, presumably to return to their lawyering.

“I liked you.”

“Aw,” she said. “I like you, too.

“So much for being on my side,” he said. “For looking out for my interests.”

With her free hand, she gently brushed his hair from his forehead. “I know you can’t see it now, but I’m here to make certain you do everything you need to do to ensure your survival.”

He stared out onto the rooftop of the building across the street. He scanned the windows and wondered which one might be Arturio Golden’s mistress’s apt. Were they making love? Will he step out of the elevator relaxed, with love in his heart, and the scent of Bambi Norcross on his flesh?

“I’m not a killer,” he said.

“Assassin,” she corrected.

“It doesn’t change a thing.”

“If you could travel back in time and assassinate—
kill
—Hitler, wouldn’t you do it, to save millions of innocent lives?” she asked.

“You’re comparing Arturio Golden to an evil despot?”

She sighed and lightly touched his cheek. “You really are that—”

“Naive?”

“Innocent,” she said.

Just then, the elevator doors opened. Coe tensed. A man in a dark suit stepped out. He was wearing sunglasses.

“That’s him,” Carmen said, and pressed the gun slightly harder against Coe’s head.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes!” she said. “Get the rifle up. Hurry!”

Coe did. Locksley or Shackleton—or both—had explained the rifle employed some sort of MEMS-gyroscope that helped the shooter to more easily find his target in the site. And Coe did. He centered the cross hairs on the side of Golden’s head. In fact, it seemed as though it was too easy, as if the gun had done all of the work.

His finger grew taut around the trigger. He could hear Carmen’s breathing. “Now,” she said, breathlessly.

Coe moved the gun slightly and squeezed the trigger, missing by a few yards. The silencer on the gun made the report minimal.

“Again!” she said. “Hurry!”

Golden neared the hoverpad. Coe set the site on him again. But, just as he had intentionally missed the first time, he knew he could not go through with murder—even if it meant his almost certain end.

He fired the shot above Golden’s head.

“You missed on purpose!” Carmen cried.

The shot was still close enough for Golden to sense something was not right. He hurried into the hovercar.

“Do it,” Coe said to Carmen. “I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of all this.”

Coe watched as the hovercar lifted into the air and began to fly away. Carmen kept the .45 pressed to his head.

“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Coe,” she said. “You’ve just disappointed a lot of people...”

The hovercar suddenly exploded in mid flight. A fireball erupted, followed by black smoke, and then pieces of debris rained down onto the rooftop.

“But,” Carmen said. “I’m not one of them.”

“What?”

She removed the gun from his head. “In approximately ten seconds, Locksley and Shackleton—or men sent by them—are about to bust through the door to kill us. I want you to leap out the window.”

“Out the window?”

“There will be a hovercar waiting just a few stories below.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Who killed Golden?”

“There’s many players in the game.” She kissed him on the mouth. “We are so very proud of you,” she said. “So very proud. Now go.”

The door burst open. As she anticipated, two men with guns rushed into the room.

“Jump!” she cried, and fired at the men.

She hit one, but the other shot her point blank in the face.

Coe leapt blindly from the window.

Thirteen.

Alice Seeley. Age Nine. Abducted from the Chadwick Fashion Mall on November 12, 20—. Foul play suspected. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of Alice Seeley, you are urged to contact Chadwick Police Department. All information will be kept confidential...

—from a 34 year-old missing child flyer

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The hovercar was a convertible. Not so surprisingly, Carmen was piloting it.

“That is what they call a four-point landing, Mr. Coe,” she said as they sped away.

Coe righted himself in the passenger seat and looked back.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I doubt we’ll be followed now.”

“How do you keep doing it?” he asked.

“Doing what?”

He cleared his throat. “Showing back up.”

She patted his knee. “All of your questions will be answered very soon.” She smiled. “Have I told you how proud we are of you, Mr. Coe?”

“Yes,” he said. “Er, no...well, a version of you has.”

“You’re silly,” she said. “Now make sure your seat belt is buckled. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you now.”

He looked out at the rooftops speeding by. “Where are we going?”

“Why back to Quantum,” she said.

“Quantum? Wait. Why Quantum?”

“You know the answer to that one, Mr. Coe.”

He watched her adjust the controls with her slender, perfectly manicured hands.

“I’m too tired to think,” he said. “Too tired for riddles.”

She smiled. “There’s only one,” she said.

And that seemed the unlikely, but obvious, answer all along.

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Coe switched off the radio.

“Sorry,” she said. “I had the radio set to mood-sensor.”

She lowered the hovercar down onto the hoverpad of the Quantum Building, where a number of other crafts in Quantum’s hovercar pool were moored.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Well,” she said. “I’m not quite sure what kind of reception were going to receive.”

They stepped out of the craft. Carmen popped the trunk and removed what appeared to be an AK-47.

“Jesus Christ,” Coe said. “What are you planning to do with that?”

“Take down an army if I have to.” She slipped the strap over her shoulder and grabbed his hand. “C’mon.”

They entered the building.

They bypassed the elevator and used the stairwell. Their lonely footfalls echoed as they descended to the lower levels.

“Whose side are we on, anyway?” he asked.

“That question no longer has any relevance,” she said.

Coe took note of the numbers on the doors as they climbed down the steps. “There’s no forty-five.”

“What?” she said.

“You kept telling me to go to forty-five. But there is no forty-five. The first door was marked forty-four when we came in from the roof.”

“There’s a forty-five,” she insisted.

“There isn’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching.”

“Think of it as more of an attitude.”

“That sounds like a catchphrase from a commercial.”

“Oh, Mr. Coe,” she said.

They continued descending steps for some time until they finally reached the floor that Coe somehow knew they were destined to arrive at: twenty-seven.

The Auditing Division.

She went to pull open the door when Coe stopped her.

“Is this where I will get all of my answers?”

“We’ve got to tie up some loose ends, first,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s all about to get worse before it gets better.”

She opened the door and they entered the floor.

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Carmen walked to a desk and picked up a phone. She dialed an extension. “We’re here,” she said into the phone. “I figured you knew. See you soon.” She hung up.

“Who was that?”

“Locksley,” she said.

“Didn’t they just try to kill us back there?”

“And that directive has not changed.” She readied the AK-47. “You might want to get your gun out of your ankle holster.”

They moved cautiously down the aisles of empty cubicles. He recognized his own. A new SCOTT COE: AUDITOR nameplate was placed in the spot where Revis’s name had been. Just then, he heard Ms. Hunter talking on the phone. They turned a corner and found her at her desk. When she saw Coe, she hung up the phone, stood, and fell into his arms.

“Oh, Mr. Coe. I was so worried. I was afraid something terrible had happened to you.”

Coe looked to Carmen, who nodded.

Ms. Hunter kissed him. “I love you,” she said. “I want to leave here. I want to go with you. I want to leave this company, this city—go far away from this place. With you—”

She noticed the guns.

“What’s going on?” she asked, nervously. “Why do you have—”

Carmen said to her, “You might want to get under your desk now.”

Ms. Hunter hesitated. “Mr. Coe—Scotty, I don’t understand—”

“You better do it,” he said.

Up ahead, Mr. Orton and his colleagues appeared dressed in their white coats. Orton, upon seeing Carmen and Coe, cried out, “The Agents of Chaos are here!”

They threw off their coats to reveal studded bullet-belts crisscrossing their chests.

“Oh, Christ,” Carmen said.

Locksley and Shackleton emerged from an adjoining aisle, leading a pack of dangerous looking and heavily-armed, men.

“The Cabal,” Carmen said. “I knew it. I knew those two weren’t lawyers.”

“Cabal? What—what’s The Cabal?”

“The Quantum within Quantum,” she said.

“Huh?”

In the aisle across from Locksley, Shackleton, and The Cabal, Ms. Davenport appeared, leading a unit of Quantum security stormtroopers. Both Lyme and Mitchell were there, too; they were bound in handcuffs.

“I’ve assumed control of the Auditing Division,” Ms. Davenport proclaimed.

“Bitch,” Coe heard Ms. Hunter remark from beneath her desk.

“It seems we have a situation on her hands,” Locksley said. “With Arturio Golden out of the way—no thanks to Mr. Coe—we are free to go ahead with our takeover of Quantum.”

“Quantum?” Coe said.

Carmen said, “The Firm of Locksley & Shackleton—along with a group of investors, collectively known as The Cabal—had been the minority shareholders of Steele.”

“Quantum’s house counsel was invested in their chief rival?” Coe asked.

“They’ve been attempting to orchestrate a hostile takeover of Quantum,” Carmen said. “But Golden, the majority shareholder, was the loan holdout.”

Ms. Davenport cried out, “Bastards.”

“But,” Carmen said, “They’ve overlooked one simple, but key, complication. Ms. Hunter?”

From under her desk, Ms. Hunter said, softly—nervously, “Quantum already owns Steele.”

“What?” Locksley said.

“That’s absurd,” Shackleton said.

“It can’t be,” Ms. Davenport said. “When?”

“Seventeen years ago,” Ms. Hunter said. “It’s all quite complicated, and it involves a lot of transactions and subsidiaries and cross-pollination—too many to recount here from under my desk—but I assure you all, Quantum owns Steele.”

“Tell me,” Carmen said, addressing everyone present as well as any auditors who might be cowering beneath their own desks. “What is it exactly that Quantum does?”

“I’m not going to stand here and take this from an—
an elevator operator
,” Ms. Davenport said.

Carmen said, “You don’t know—none of you. You don’t know. You come to work everyday and you sit at your desks and complete forms and you run reports and you go over numbers and graphs and pie charts, and you measure your gains and losses, your successes and failures by these—
bottom lines
. But ultimately, you don’t know what any of it means. You don’t know what your seemingly mundane, innocuous little tasks—tasks you accomplish while not even thinking about them—do to your fellow man.”

“Bravo, Carmen,” Orton said. “Bravo. She does put a pretty face on our movement, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, shut up, Orton,” she said. “I’m no more a part of your rebellion than I am an elevator operator,” a statement that prompted Coe to say:

“What exactly are you, anyway?”

“I’m your savior,” she said without so much as a hint of a smile.

“What’s with Lyme and Mitchell?” Coe said to Ms. Davenport. “Why do you have them in handcuffs?”

“Political prisoners,” she said. “Part of the old regime.”

“She’s lost her mind,” Coe said to Carmen.

“She’s done half of our job for us,” Carmen said.

“Huh?”

Carmen raised her gun and pointed it at Ms. Davenport. “Tell your men to stand down. I’m here to advise you, that effective immediately, you’ve all just been terminated.”

Ms. Davenport sneered. “And by whose authority?”

“Alice Seeley.”

“Alice Seeley?” Orton said. “Alice Seeley is a folk rock band named for a missing child flyer.”

“Not that Alice Seeley, you idiot,” she said. “Alice Seeley. CEO of Quantum.”

Locksley said, “Bullshit. CEO of Quantum is...”

“It’s not someone named for a folk rock group, that’s for sure,” Shackleton said.

“You’re a fucking mole,” Orton said and drew his side arm. “I don’t believe it. We had a fucking snitch in our midst.”

He fired at Carmen, striking her in the left shoulder. She returned fire, shooting Orton in the face. “That’s for all the times you squeezed my ass,” said.

The Quantum security unit opened fire; so did Locksley and Shackleton and The Cabal. It was a dizzying scene. Bullets whizzed by, a cloud of smoke developed—the smell of cordite choked the manufactured, recycled air.

Lyme and Mitchell had no chance. They were the first to die. Ms. Davenport charged forward shooting Locksley in the heart; Shackleton took a bullet in the throat.

Carmen pushed Coe behind a desk and opened fire with the assault rifle. She made short work of the remaining factions. From Coe’s position, he could see Ms. Hunter beneath her desk, plugging her ears with her fingers. After a moment, it was all over.

“All clear, Mr. Coe,” Carmen said.

He stood. He realized he was still holding his handgun. He dropped it to the floor, as if it were responsible for the carnage—though he never even fired a shot.

He scanned over the dead. Locksley, Shackleton, Orton, Ms. Davenport, Lyme—Mitchell, his eyes still open, staring like a prawn. He longed for his old filing job in the Research Department back at the Philadelphia office—far from all of this destruction.

It was then that he noticed Carmen was bleeding in multiple places on her chest, abdomen, and legs.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

She lay the rifle down. “I’ve had just about enough of this business,” she said.

Ms. Hunter crawled from beneath the desk. She was weeping. Coe held her in his arms.

Carmen moved toward Ms. Hunter’s desk and picked up her phone. She dialed a number she seemed to know well. “We’ll need a clean up squad,” she said. “That’s right. Twenty-seven.”

Just then, something stirred within the mass of bodies. Smoke emerged from around the collars of both Locksley and Shackleton. Suddenly, mechanical wings sprung from the sides of their heads which detached from the bodies. Their heads flew upward.

Carmen noticed too late. She stretched for her gun, but a spray of bullets from Locksley’s head caught her in the chest and neck. She picked up the rifle, and in her dying breath, shot the Locksley cell-bot out of the air.

Coe dove to the floor to retrieve his gun as the Shackleton cell-bot swooped toward him. He picked up the gun when he heard Ms. Hunter cry, “No!”

She dove in front of him as the cell-bot fired a round of bullets at Coe. Ms. Hunter fell over him. He held her up and fired at the cell-bot. It took three shots, but he finally blasted it from the air.

“Ms. Hunter,” he said, and then more softly, “Delly...”

She looked up at him at this mentioning of his name. Coe felt blood on his hands where he held her. She’d been shot multiple times in the back. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell...me...”

She was gone.

He sat on the floor with her for some time, holding her—until a crew in white jumpsuits arrived to dispose of the bodies.