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I am being followed.
I know I am. “No,” is not an answer. “You’re delusional, Curtis,” is also not an answer. “Why do finance people always get their midlife crisis with a side of assassination paranoia?” is completely out and I resent the remark. Just because I am nearing the age where someone could theoretically start wondering about the life he’s lived and, in cases of weaker character, worrying about inconsequential nonsense like “the meaning of it all,” “the bigger picture,” “all the things I still haven’t done,” or “what kind of life am I even living,” doesn’t mean it has anything whatsoever to do with me. I am not an imbecile. I have my life figured out. No looking back, no could-haves, no regrets. Non, je ne regrette mien. Rien. Whatever.
No, it’s about the money, you see. It’s about what I know.
I work as a financial planner. I tell people what to do with their money. How not to lose it. How to make more. Which means, obviously, that I am great with my own finances too. I invested, I insured, I managed funds. I worked hard, I worked smart and I’ve turned what I had into a fortune.
It wasn’t even that complicated, really. People say that whatever I touch turns to gold, but in the end it’s all about making the decision to stop, sit down and properly think things through. Everyone should try that every once in a while.
But when you’re in the business for some time, you accumulate secrets. Many secrets, even. Some people would be willing to die for them. Some would be willing to kill.
I said I’m not crazy. My intuition has never failed me. And I am telling you, there are… men watching me. Government men. Or people who look like them. I see them around the street corners when I go to work, I catch them in the windows of the office buildings I pass, I go down to the lobby of this oversized glass box that pretends to be a house and there is always one, somewhere off to the side, just staring at me over his dark glasses, thinking I can’t see that it’s me he’s checking out.
I could hire security. I should, I’m told, if I’m so nervous. But you have to understand that security could easily be just another one of them. I hire someone, I have no way of knowing they won’t just stab me in the back. Maybe literally. If it’s the government, they can fake their references. Their papers. Anything they want. And if they’re someone’s private goons… then they’ll have neither scruples nor mercy. So just like the government, really.
Besides, do you know how many Roman Emperors were killed by their own Praetorian Guard? The very people who were supposed to be the last line of defence standing between the big man and an assassin’s blade?
No, no, no. That wouldn’t do at all.
The man is in the lobby again. I’m watching him. He’s watching me.
He’s tall. They all are. And noticeably pale. Maybe I got a squadron that doesn’t get out in the sun much, but I doubt it. They could be wearing makeup, some experimental secret lab stuff that makes their skin hard to break. I don’t know and obviously I am not going to ask. “Hello, kind sir who is probably here to stage a hit on me, sorry for bothering you, but is that matching powder and foundation, shade 71 – Nude Ivory on your face? Yes, I know what that is, no I’m not gay, some clients like to take their wives and girlfriends to meetings and this stuff comes up occasionally, anyway, you’re much better at this interrogation stuff then I am and that’s great, good for you, but I’ve still got to ask, is that secret service makeup you’re wearing?”
I still don’t understand why they are so conspicuous. It’s as if they’re not even trying to hide.
They blend in with the staff, the businessmen, the building security just fine. But the second you understand they’re there, they stick out like a sore thumb. The ugly suits, the uglier hair, the glasses, the earpiece. How does everyone not notice them everywhere?
Or maybe I just have an excellent talent for observation. I like to actually look at what’s around me, you know. Most people don’t. They just get on with their day and that’s the end of it for them. But not me.
And I also know how to be inconspicuous. An odd skill to have in my line of work, to be sure, since everyone in finance loves being the biggest, loudest-crowing cock in the room. Oh look, my big new car, oh look, this suit is Armani, oh look, this mistress is from Armani too! I fucking hate these people. A bunch of superficial idiots who think chasing the newest hot bullshit and then screaming out from the rooftops what big boys they are and how much bigger dick they have will bring them happiness. It won’t.
No, the right thing to do is this: you keep your head low. You let people remember your name and your work but not you. And you spend the money you earn quietly on whatever makes you – personally – happy.
That’s it. That’s all there is. Just stay unobjectionable, stay under the radar, enjoy the fruits of your labour and you’ll be fine.
I cross the glass-walled lobby as briskly as I can and try to pretend to the G-man that I can’t see him, but catching my reflection in the transparent surface behind him, I’m clearly not fooling anyone. I don’t care. I just need to get to the elevator, ride to my apartment near the very top, sprint inside, shut the door, lock every single lock I have and then I’ll be alright.
Almost there. Apartment 1801. I can see the door.
My door is a sturdy construct. Wood and metal. Chains, latches. A state-of-the-art lock. A metal bar on the other side, just in case the locks fail. One of my finer investments, if I do say so myself.
The tumblers click. The last lock opens.
Home, sweet home.
I slam the door behind me and try to slow down my breathing. Why do I always have to get so worked up? It’s alright. I’m fine.
I know there are a million good, sensible reasons why the Feds would like to keep an eye on this building. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with me. It’s entirely possible they’re not here to hurt anyone. Maybe they are investigating some kind of iffy financial scheme that happened to seem linked to the parent company. Yeah. That would make sense.
All I want is to collapse into one of the green leather chairs in my living room. Another great decision – they took me ages to find, but they are the most comfortable things on the planet Earth. If this were a movie, I’d have probably poured myself a glass of overpriced whiskey and lit a fat cigar to show I was a nervous yet properly rotten Wall Street rat fruitlessly trying to unwind after a hard day of my luxurious yet empty existence. But I don’t smoke and only drink when I’d look like a tool if I didn’t. Blunting my senses doesn’t calm me. It shouldn’t calm you, either.
It’s funny. I’ve never taken this luxury for granted. I think that’s the difference between me and the rest of them. The finance people, I mean. Living with less doesn’t scare me. I know I’ll survive, should the worst come to worst. And when the money did eventually come to me? I didn’t waste it. I simply went and fixed my life with it. Most of them wouldn’t have a clue where to even start.
Instead of immediately sitting down and letting exhaustion claim me for the rest of the afternoon, I decide to take off my suit jacket – a mistake it turns out, since my shirt is drenched with sweat and cold as hell, but putting it back on now feels even more disgusting – and I walk towards the window. There are few better cures for feeling trapped. The glass pane takes up the entire wall and on a clear day, the sun shines through and lights up the whole room.
This day is not clear – the sky is an eggshell white – but you can still see the city from here, overflowing with movement, cars dashing to and fro, people scurrying all around like ants in an anthill, purposeful and alive. The glass towers above them reflect the pale light and scatter it among themselves, a single beam of sunshine exchanged, refracted and through a million mirrors transformed and united again into something new. Maybe my own window has become a mirror for a moment, shining out this very second, becoming a single bright thread in a shimmering web of light. The city is all around me and I am part of it. There is something beautiful in that. In being a part of something greater than yourself.
I touch the clear fragile barrier between myself and the rest of the world, and as I do, it explodes into a thousand glittering pieces.
The mahogany floor slams into my back like a hammer.
My skull is heavy and pounding and there is something cold under my splayed fingers. As the world lazily unblurs, I realise it’s broken glass.
A strangely distant thought echoes through my mind as if from somewhere underwater: I should have kept my jacket. I wouldn’t be cold. I wouldn’t be wet. The glass wouldn’t cut into my arms. I think there is blood in my mouth… Wouldn’t have happened if I’d worn a jacket…
My chest is horribly heavy. I can’t breathe.
“Don’t scream. Stay quiet and you’ll get out of here alive.”
Oh. I see. My chest is heavy because there is someone sitting on it.
The dark blot of ink above me coagulates into a person, silhouetted partly by the light above my securely locked apartment door, and partly by the few rays of sunshine slipping through the newly-formed cracks between the clouds. The rays enter the room through the shattered window gingerly, like curious onlookers peeking into a stranger’s home. The sun might be setting soon.
“You want to get out of here alive, don’t you?” A swift hand is now covering my mouth. It’s warm and presses the smell of sweat directly into my nostrils. It brings my focus back to what’s important. The other hand attached to the silhouette is holding up a gun. “Moan into my palm if you do.”
I moan.
“Alright!” the figure whispers brightly. “I am putting my hand away now.” The other limb steadies, aiming the gun squarely at my temple. “Remember… no sudden noises!” The delivery is sing-song. The cheerfulness forced.
The palm moves away from my mouth and the weight shifts from my chest further back. I breathe in a lungful of air, raggedly and desperately, much like a broken vacuum cleaner plugged into a socket for the first time in years. The noise was also about the same.
I don’t scream.
The figure above me seems pleased. Despite the backlight, my eyes finally adjust enough to start recognising a face. It’s a man. It’s somehow calming to have that confirmation – his voice was disconcertingly ambiguous, but now I have a firm data point and a vague semblance of order is being restored to the world.
He is dressed in something tight and black. His hair is long, dark and tied in a thick braid, and his gaze, despite the general impression that he could have used a few more hours of sleep, is alarmingly full of focus. The whole getup together makes him look like some kind of an underground singer. His face feels distantly familiar, as if I’ve seen him somewhere before. Could I have met him around the offices? Nah, I would have definitely remembered a man with more hair than most stockbrokers’ wives. Hell, maybe he is a singer. They don’t make much, the less famous ones. Stealing my furniture would probably improve his budget by a significant margin.
The other option is that they sent him. Outside funding would at the very least help explain how on earth he just managed to appear out of nowhere and crash a window on a floor in double digits. But… a man like this wouldn’t work with the Feds, would he? Or with our competition? And men of status certainly wouldn’t want someone like that, right?
No. This might be exactly what they need. Plausible deniability.
I am truly and thoroughly fucked.
The suspected singer-slash-assassin turns his head for a second, checking the shattered window to his side, a ruptured membrane between me and the outside world. The sun is now turning the vanishing clouds golden, but no longer receives any brilliant rays back from us. The man scans the room and eventually, he twists his body around just enough to notice the barred door behind him. His attention returns to me.
“That the only way out?” he whispers, part exasperated, part amused. Apparently, leaving through the window again is a no-go.
“... yes,” I croak. My throat is so dry I’m surprised the sound is parsable as a word at all, and not as, say, the noise of grinding gravel that also has a cold. But the man seems to take it in stride.
“Then I’m going to need you to find your keys to the kingdom and unlock this sky fortress. Can you do that for me?” he asks, as if he cannot believe what he is saying any more than I can. And, well. A high-stakes hostage situation and he has to ask me to let him out. Maybe this is his first assassination?
I nod, slowly, and fruitlessly try to avoid hitting my head on the floor again as I do it. The keys are in my pocket but I can hardly reach them when he’s kneeling on top of me.
“Yeah. Just let me raise my hands…” I manage. This time, I sound almost human.
“Alright. But careful, remember to stay q…” he starts.
Suddenly, his eyes narrow.
“Did you say…” He leans forward, closer to my face. “How long do you live here?”
What on earth? Not only is he a state-sponsored terrorist, but this is his idea of an interrogation? “Years. I am a financial…”
He doesn’t let me finish. “I never forget a voice.” I can feel his body tense and still. All at once, the full force of his gaze bores into me and it feels like being disassembled from the inside and piece by piece put back together again. An insect under a magnifying glass, trying not to burn.
He breathes out.
“It is you.”
There is disbelief in his words, and surprise, yes, but… it is also mixed with – warmth, almost, that I don't understand. I'm in pain, probably bleeding, and the man the Feds and/or our business competitors sent to brutalise me talks to me as if he knows me. And good god… his tone makes me wish he did. There is not much warmth in my world – just cold hard numbers. They cannot be negotiated with, or persuaded, or changed by tears and pleading. And they are managed, of course, by cold hard pricks who pretend to own them when they aren't even grown-ups enough to own up to their own lives.
It's absurd. And shameful in its absurdity. The man is kneeling on top of me, aiming a gun at my head and all I can think of is how much I wish he – someone – could speak that way to me again.
“But… what are you doing here?” My wish is granted. He is concerned for me. Or maybe I just imagine he is. How hard I hit my head falling I'll never know. The edges of my world still shift like disturbed water.
I don't answer him. I don't know how.
He raises his free hand slowly, carefully, then gently moves a bit of hair from my face, as if those few short strands could meaningfully obscure his view. I almost want to laugh.
“But…” he repeats, clearly unsure how to continue. “I thought you were dead. The whole crew was reported dead, the ship…”
Without warning, his full weight is on my chest again. His eyes are suddenly burning brighter than the red-rimmed sun outside.
“You.”
His voice cracks. The same gentle hand that was playing with my hair just a moment ago now grabs me by the collar. “It was you. You betrayed them.”
Betrayed? “Betrayed who?” I squeeze out, but air is becoming scarce in my windpipe. I sound pitiful. “I don’t… I don’t understand…”
“Your crew,” he snarls, voice strained and rising. His face, handsome just a moment before, twists in anger so raw it terrifies me more than the gun in his hand. “Your crew, you disgusting, dishonourable, abominable piece of shit.”
“Crew?” None of this makes any sense. I don’t understand what I did wrong, what I did to this man whose name I don’t even know, but his rage frightens me, it wrenches something in my gut, and desperately, pathetically, I really don’t want to die.
He is leaning so forward now that his face is nearly touching mine, fury warping his features beyond recognition. “Are you telling me you don’t know? Actually don’t know?” No more hushed whispers – his words are a stillborn scream, just barely choked halfway out of a throat, and when he laughs, it’s a mirthless hysterical sound. “What, did they make you drink bleach? Dip your brain in chlorine, wash it nice and slow, so you could forget what you did?” He’s pressing his gun against my temple with greater and greater force, as if he would be able to explain what was happening inside if only he let the barrel drill a deep enough hole into my skull.
“Did you never wonder how you’ve got all this?” The man gestures with his free hand at the room, the apartment, the whole glass structure around him. “Do you think you have it because you are just oh so good?” His tone is so acidic you could use it to etch gold.
I don’t want to answer him, but the barrel of his gun pressing painfully against the side of my head makes it clear he expects me to. “I don’t– It’s just my job to–”
“Bullshit!” It didn’t seem possible he could grow any angrier, but both of our bodies shake with the force of his fury. His face is so close now it occupies almost my entire field of vision. The shrinking world he doesn’t yet dominate is bathed in red-gold light. The sunset must be incredible, but all I can see out of the corner of my eye is the light reflected by the glass mirrors of the skyscrapers around us, turning their magnificent towers the colour of blood. Their borrowed glare encircles the man’s head with the crimson halo of an avenging saint. Fiery sparks dance in his hair. If he stays close he might burn us both.
When he speaks, a small bit of spittle flies from his mouth and I desperately try not to wince, but fuck, I need to breathe, I– “Bullshit. You got all this, you only could have got all this, you only could be what you are if you let other people die SO YOU COULD LIVE LIKE THIS!”
He is pressed so close to me I can feel his heart beating.
“And you don’t even have the decency to remember it.”
The sound that interrupts him is horrible.
It doesn’t even register as a sound at first. It rattles the walls, the floor, the brain in my skull. It’s a rumbling so loud it hurts.
Once, twice, then a third blow, altered, a screeching and a crash, as behind him the metal bar on my fortified door shatters in half and flies off from the force of the impact, the door breaking off its hinges behind it, a mad swirling amalgam of metal and wood.
In the doorway stands a silhouette. I would recognise it anywhere.
They were never here for me.
The Fed raises a gun, aligns it with the man’s head and his blood-red halo drowns us both.
***
When the second man in a suit arrived less than a minute later, there was little for him to do. The first one was already checking the two bodies on the ground, and from the looks of it following all the correct procedures.
“I see I am late.”
“Yes.” There was no accusation in the kneeling man’s tone, only a flat confirmation of the fact. “All assailants have been traced and eliminated.”
“And faster than the last time as well. Excellent.” He gave the apartment a cursory glance. “Any further assistance needed?” The answer was more than obvious, but he preferred to be polite.
“Not here, but I appreciate the offer. I have already compiled the preliminary mission report. You should be receiving it as we speak.”
The late arrival performed what, when measured under a sufficiently advanced microscope, might have been considered a nod. He took a more thorough account of the situation. The two bodies lay on top of each other, their heads ruined jointly and without distinction. The sequence of events was becoming clear.
“The bullet overpenetrated.”
“Predictably,” the first man confirmed in a somewhat distant tone and rose up, holding the gun in his right hand. His left was bloodied from examining the bodies. “Any new information on the goals of the crew?”
“I suspect they were attempting to abuse the particulars of the last comms upgrade to monitor our activity in the area, albeit obviously unsuccessfully. I’ll send the initial analysis,” the second man replied. “Granted, I haven’t conclusively ruled out a simple need for revenge. It wouldn’t be unlike them to risk their own lives just to take another’s and consider that their top priority.” He turned to his companion. “But I will have a full report ready once we return. So if you’re quite finished with the bodies…” He gestured towards the door – or rather the place the door had been a just a few minutes ago. It was a small, restrained gesture – barely a twitch of the hand. Nothing more was done because nothing more was needed.
Until now, that was.
“Sterling?”
The man called Sterling stood motionless above the two corpses, weapon still in hand. Specks of blood were turning his cuffs the wrong shade of brown.
“Sterling, is there anything else?” This was unusual. The second man’s colleague rarely delayed or hesitated.
The silence stretched for a few more seconds before Sterling spoke.
“I wish to hear your opinion, Fletcher.”
“On what?”
“This.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Was this… appropriate?” Sterling indicated the bodies, each now about one eighth short of a man. In the quickly fading crimson of the sunset, their imperfection could have seemed like a trick of the light. “Was this situation handled as it should have been?”
A more expressive man might have raised an eyebrow or two, but Fletcher simply inclined his head. “Of course it was. The rebel was a disruptive element and willing to kill. Not taking the shot would have allowed him the possibility of escape and cost us more lives in the long run. Under the circumstances, a single pod is a perfectly acceptable loss.”
“No, I understand that,” Sterling snapped back, seemingly returned from his brief fugue. When he addressed Fletcher again, there was an air of overcorrection to his words. “And I do appreciate your analysis and your agreement. But that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was this.” His gaze was drifting slowly but inexorably back to the scene on the ground. “This man performed a valuable service for us. In turn, we promised to watch over him and grant him all the animal comforts his heart desired. And yet…” For a moment, he seemed at a loss for words. “It seems… a shame. It seems… unjust.”
Now it was Fletcher’s turn for silence.
“I see,” he offered eventually.
It was not enough.
He considered his colleague, the mess on the floor and the darkening sky beyond them. Finally, he stepped towards the destroyed window, shattered glass crunching under his black shoes and dotting the walls with strange constellations – a few pinpricks of borrowed glow still full of fire, but many growing cold like starlight flickering across a shallow ocean floor. The sun was waning from a mad thermonuclear furnace into a dying ember. It was unusual for a sunset to be so vivid in this world, and Fletcher knew, with a certainty which was both casual and absolute, that once the sun disappeared from view – and so, in all the ways that mattered, from reality – the sight would not repeat for a very long time.
He stood there for a while, motionless except for breathing.
“I do not believe it to be either unjust or unfair,” he said, his words slow and deliberate. Cold air was filling the room through the shard-rimmed opening where a glass barrier used to be. Standing at the precipice, it was a long way down. “He received his reward. He lived a life of prestige and comfort most can only dream of, free of any reason for worry. The last few minutes excepted… he must have spent his remaining time happy and unaware.” Fletcher’s eyes turned directly towards the sun as the last slivers of light vanished beyond the skyline of the city. “What more could anyone truly ask for?”
They waited in the quiet and the dark. Down beneath them, stories and stories below the punctured window, firefly lights of cars and people were flowing back and forth in their neverending dance.
The creaking of the splinters told Fletcher his companion was joining him by the window. (After the silence, there was something faintly absurd about the sound.) Side by side now, their little square of broken glass seemed lost in the many-celled skyscraper forest around them.
“I suppose you are right,” Sterling said, a glint of gunmetal disappearing in his jacket. In the barely-there reflected light of the outside world, the stains on his cuffs were all but invisible.
There appeared to be something else he wished to say and Fletcher decided to wait until the words were ready to come out. They were simple.
“Thank you.”
For one more ephemeral moment, the two men remained there, breathing the unusually fresh air coming through the open window. Then, they were both gone.
The other glass towers returned their missing gaze, blind and unbroken.