The Silent Army

abilities would live in a place like this, but then she didn’t seem to find anything wrong with it. Her downstairs neighbor, Karen, was a good friend too. That might be a factor now. Karen was better for her, in many ways, than I was.

I approached the front, stepping over a pothole filled with water. As I made my way up the stairs, I checked in with the home office.

Any word yet on Takanawa?

Nothing yet.

We needed to bring him in soon; he was the only concrete link left to the missing case. His apartment was empty, with no sign of it or the device he’d left the hotel with. Travel records indicated he hadn’t left the country, at least not legally, but he was nowhere to be found.

The door recognized my ID and let me in when I flashed my badge. The elevator inside was out of order, so I hiked the six flights before I remembered that Zoe had moved back into her old place. She was on the seventh floor now. I still hadn’t gotten the full story on that.

Stop being careless with her. The strange woman at the bar, Penny, had said that. Maybe things were moving too fast for Zoe. I was asking a lot of her and being sober was still a struggle; I could see it. Was I being careless with her?

I knocked on the door, and when she answered it, the first thing that struck me was how sad she looked. She was clean and she had some color even, but her eyes looked as sad as ever. When she looked up at me, there were almost tears in them.

“You look nice,” I told her. Whoever had picked the little black dress out for her had gotten it right. She’d splurged and had her hair styled. She looked the best I’d ever seen her.

“Thanks,” she said, but she didn’t look me in the eye when she said it and she didn’t smile. “You do too.”

The suit they’d sent over for me put anything else I had to shame, and fit almost perfectly. I wasn’t familiar with designers, but I got the sense it cost a fortune.

“Are you all set?” I asked. She nodded and managed a smile, but it was gone just as quickly.

On the stairs she had trouble in her heels, so I gave her my arm. When she took it, her face and neck turned red. I held my coat over her while I got her into the car, then went back around and got in next to her.

“You okay?” I asked, pulling back out onto the main street. She nodded, looking at the floor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

An armored vehicle with military markings passed by the street ahead of us, a floodlight sweeping through the rain. In the distance, a helicopter moved between two buildings.

“Why are there so many cops?” she asked.

“Something happened,” I said.

“The briefcase?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at the floor and made a face.

“I didn’t get anything out of that woman at the hospital,” Zoe said. “Sorry.”

The photos had been grisly. By the time I got in touch with them, the police had already been called and photographed the scene. Zoe had been captured on the security camera leaving the building, but sometime between then and when I actually arrived at the hospital, someone had gotten to the people involved. The police dropped Zoe as a person of interest and turned the whole thing over to us, with no resistance at all. Someone was watching us.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said.

“The guy from this morning doesn’t know where the case is,” she said, “but he did say there were several targets.”

I nodded. I’d seen Vesco’s report.

“Are they nukes?” she asked in a small voice.

I wasn’t supposed to divulge that information, but I nodded. She got quiet.

“Do you want to get out of the city?” I asked her. “After tonight, you could take off for a while.”

“Would you come with me?”

“I can’t.”

Fog blew past the headlights as another helicopter banked down the main drag in the distance. Zoe was quiet for a minute, clutching a little purse in her lap and fiddling with the clasp as I drove.

“I talked to Vesco too, like you wanted,” she said.

“And?”

“Someone got to him. They wiped his memory. Alice—”

She stopped short. When I glanced over at her, she looked uncomfortable.

“Alice Hsieh?” I asked. “What about her?”

“Nothing. She was nice. That was all.”

Something was bothering her, and not just the threat of public embarrassment. She seemed distracted.

“Sorry you got stuck with me tonight.”

“I’m not stuck with you, Zoe. You need to stop—”

“I know—it’s your idea of a hot date, hanging out with a skinny, ugly alcoholic.”

I opened my mouth, and she cut me off immediately, holding up her hand.

“Don’t answer that.”

This is going to become a problem.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “You’re leaving with her, not with me.”

“Leaving with who?”

“She leaves. She leaves in a hurry, and you go after her.”

I glanced at her, slouched in the passenger’s seat. Sleet began to pepper the windshield.

“Was that something you saw—”

“Just never mind,” she said. Despite my occasional prodding, she wouldn’t say anything else for the rest of the trip.

When we rolled up in my car, the valet took one look at it and said something into his two-way radio. He looked surprised when he scanned my ID.

“You’re expected, Agent Wachalowski,” he said.“Business or pleasure?”

I used the backscatter to look into the soft tissue of his eyes and saw the camera implanted there. We were going to end up on the news, assuming he could sell it.

“I’ll let you know on the way out,” I told him.

I tossed him the key as I guided Zoe away, toward the entrance. In the crowd gathered outside, I picked out at least twenty more concealed cameras looking for celebrities, politicians, or both.

“Who are you with?” a voice shouted from behind. “Hey! Who are you with?” I opened the door and ushered Zoe through.

Inside, Suehiro 9 was more or less what I expected; a place where the wealthy went to enjoy being wealthy. It was the kind of place that third tiers associated with first tiers, but the truth was, I was no more welcome there than they were. When we approached the hostess, she looked us both over, mentally identifying designer labels. She looked like a model.

“Name?” she asked without smiling. She looked at Zoe with so much contempt that it made me angry.

“We’re with Motoko Ai,” I told her. The name got an immediate reaction. Her face stayed cool but her eyes flashed. She changed her tone immediately.

“Mr. Wachalowski,” she said. “This way.”

If Ai was trying to impress me, it worked. To orchestrate the meeting on such short notice couldn’t have been easy or cheap. The meeting could have happened anywhere, but she chose the most exclusive restaurant in the city. She was trying to influence us, maybe, to wine and dine us, but I wondered if it wasn’t something more. I wondered if she wasn’t flaunting me specifically, and the agency I worked for, for the eyes that she knew watched her.

When we approached the table, I saw that Penny, the woman who approached me at the bar, was there. I could tell right away that she wasn’t a colleague or a chaperone; Penny worked for Ai. It was clear from the way