Fire of the Dark Triad Read online

She entered the lobby, checked with reception and was let in. I watched as she approached Remir’s unit and opened his door.

  “Kir, delete my card from the camera images. And … block the feed from me.”

  Did I do it because she’d asked me, or because I didn’t want to see what was happening inside that room? In any case, I knew that I had a problem. I wasn’t behaving rationally anymore. Moreover, I was acting downright stupidly, because everything was quite simple. In a moment she would walk out, wait for his discharge, and then they would leave the hospital together. We would drive to Oren’s outskirts and travel the remaining way to the shuttle on foot. Not much to it, really, and afterwards we would all have a comfortable flight home. And yes, I would handle it just fine.

  Lita suddenly stepped out of the room into the hospital hallway and leaned against a wall as if trying to regain her balance. I had no idea what to make of her strange expression, but I didn’t like it. She slowly walked along the corridor towards the exit, went down the hospital steps and crossed the small lawn where our mesh chairs still stood in the same position close to each other. All the while she wore the same expression of helpless disorientation. There definitely was some snag with Remir, and it was the last thing I needed. No more games, I decided.

  “Kir, rewind your log to the moment when she entered his room and play the whole segment that I asked not to see,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Kir immediately showed me the interior of Remir’s unit from the viewpoints of my surveillance chip on Lita’s shoulder and the hospital camera under the ceiling. Remir, half-sitting in the reclined bed, started talking to Lita right away.

  “I just heard the news. The whole thing is too weird. If I died on the way to the ER, then I am in a very peculiar type of hell. This explosion and …” he frowned, as if trying to clear the confusion in his head, “I told you about Nick, right?”

  Lita pulled a chair over next to his bed and sat down with her back to the room’s camera. I couldn’t see her expression, but at least the microphone inside my chip on her dress worked.

  “You did tell me. And no, you didn’t die.”

  I didn’t know what he read on her face, but he glanced aside.

  “Lita, about that morning and … the night before …”

  “Forget it,” she said in an even tone, “the situation is worse than you think.”

  He looked at her with relief. I almost smiled.

  “Is it? How do you know?”

  “Nick gave me a comprehensive overview.”

  “You talked to him?” he raised his eyebrows.

  She nodded, “He waited outside the hospital.”

  “Did he tell you what he wanted?”

  “Remir, things have turned really nasty here, but because you passed this test of his, we can leave. We can move to Earth.”

  “Lita, wait. This Nick could be saying anything. Not that I care about our president, but who blew him up?”

  “Check this out,” she said and pulled out the card I gave her and held it so that he could see the recording.

  As he watched his face became gloomier. When the clip ended, he took the card from Lita and slowly rotated it in his hands. Now, it again looked like just a piece of plain blue plastic.

  “Fine. If this thing isn’t manufactured, then it’s definitely a military coup.”

  “It’s real, Remir, and you will be arrested. Nick found you on the detention list.”

  “I see.”

  I was impressed – he didn’t flinch.

  “Well, then it will make sense to get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough of this place anyway. Unless it’s even worse on that … Earth. What do you think?”

  “Remir, it’s not worse. I trust him.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “He showed me his planet. It felt right. I didn’t see fear in people’s eyes. It was so beautiful, too,” she paused for a moment. “I don’t think he made it up. I could tell because he mentioned these little details from his life, his childhood.” Her voice suddenly got warmer, “For example, he showed me an education center – the one he went to. There was a girl he liked, and he walked on a beam between two buildings to get her attention. I saw the beam … their civilization is very advanced, obviously. Their technology is mind-boggling, but it isn’t the most impressive part. Their world seems to be free and … humane.”

  Remir was watching her face and his eyes became harder and harder. Lita, be careful, I thought, knowing that it was already too late.

  “They built new continents in the oceans, but they remained in harmony with nature. He showed me an artificial island where he spent his last vacation. He made friends with a bird there; he played a recording as it waited for him on his porch … to say good morning.”

  “Was there anything you didn’t like?”

  She still didn’t see it coming.

  “Well, people there don’t seem to be too exciting. Nick is not typical.”

  “Lita, what happened between you and Nick?”

  “What are you saying?” she said, her voice lacking even a shade of proper indignation.

  I couldn’t see her face, but his eyes narrowed as if blinded by a flashlight.

  “Lita, I don’t know. I’m going to think about all this.”

  She didn’t move, and the pause was becoming abnormally long.

  “Remir, you’re on the list,” she finally said, panic rising in her voice. “What is there to think about?”

  “I understand. But, as I said, I need to think this through. They told me that I need to stay here another day in order to monitor my condition. Seems like a perfect arrangement.”

  She leaned forward to take his hand, but he lifted his arm before she could touch it, and brushed a strand of his hair from his forehead. She recoiled as if he had hit her.

  “Lita, go away, please. We will talk tomorrow.”

  She stood, picked up her bag from the foot of his bed and made a step towards the door, and then abruptly turned back and gave him an awkward hug. He didn’t respond, looking straight over her shoulder, at the opposite corner of the ceiling, almost directly into my eyes. Nonsense, I thought, he wouldn’t know the camera’s position. His arms remained motionless alongside his body, but when she started to straighten up, he suddenly stopped her, jerking his wires so sharply that the monitors simultaneously blinked. He pulled her close and held her in a tight embrace, so strong that I thought it must have hurt.

  “Visitation time is over. Please vacate the recovery unit,” a sterile voice announced from the intercom above the room entrance. Remir’s grip grew even tighter before he let go and fell back onto the pillows.

  “Kir, stop the recording,” I said and moved to the chair and kept looking at the door until it opened.

  Lita walked in and dropped her bag on the floor.

  “He sensed something when I was talking to him,” she said in a flat voice. “He has always been good at it.”

  Of course, he was, considering his Dark Triad score, I thought.

  “He will know for sure when he sees us together,” she continued, “and there’s no way he will go with you then.”

  “But, Lita – he did understand that he would be arrested, didn’t he?”

  “He told me he needed … to think. They will keep him until tomorrow. His test results are fine, but his doctor is cautious because of his unexplained coma. So, he will stay there one more day and then, I don’t know. It seems that we have killed him, Nick.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was absolutely nothing I could say. It was my fault, as simple as that.

  “Nick,” she said not looking at me, “I need to be by myself, away from both of you. Can you please leave my room?” I got up and walked towards the door. I had no control over the situation at the moment.

  “I’ll contact you as so
on as … I am able,” she added.

  I tried to keep my distance from her on my way out, but she unexpectedly came over, hugged me, and there was something in her hug that I didn’t like. It felt like a farewell.

  It was a farewell, I thought, crossing the hallway. The only way she could save Remir was to erase any memories of me.

  I entered my room and sat down in the chair. Regardless of my psychological condition, I had to analyze the options and plan my actions. I was still a professional, I had to remind myself. But before focusing on the overview of the global Beta Blue situation, I quickly checked on Lita through the chip on her dress. She was curled up on the bed in a very still position. She wasn’t sleeping as far as I could tell from her breathing. I switched my attention to the city.

  The picture looked worse than my most pessimistic expectations. The streets were quiet, almost empty, with few people outside. The detention list was growing, as was the number of people that had already been picked up by inconspicuous military vehicles. I thought that if Remir refused to go with me, I would need to leave the planet immediately. The current conditions were too dangerous to look for another outlier. Remir would die in this scenario, and I will have effectively killed him. But then again, I could have chosen a different target in the first place. Remir died in that case too – shot in a basement, starved in a camp, or left in a cell with a noose to hang himself. But it wouldn’t have been my fault.

  Lita stirred on her bed. She got up and looked into the small refrigerator. It was empty with the exception of a lonely liquor bottle. She grabbed her bag and walked out of the room. I thought that any energy from my food bar had to be running out by now, and that she was probably going to get something to eat from a vending machine downstairs.

  She got to the lobby and, as I expected, picked up some items from the automatic food dispenser. She stuffed them in her bag and returned to the elevator. The doors opened, but she glanced at the corner where a security camera was positioned in plain view and hesitated. Then she turned around, quickly walked towards the stairway and ran down the steps leading toward the garage. She must have guessed that I could jam the elevator, I thought, and darted to the door.

  “Kir, bring the lift to my level,” I exhaled, sprinting to the end of the corridor. The elevator doors were opening with dignified slowness, so I forcefully pushed them aside and jumped in.

  “Skip all floors to the garage,” I said. The car whirred and unhurriedly moved down, “Kir, make it go faster!”

  “I can’t override the speed, Nick,” Kir replied immediately, “it’s a hard setting.”

  Lita, on the other hand, didn’t lose any time. She crossed the garage floor, got into her rental and without a moment of hesitation drove toward the exit. I attempted to take over the autopilot, but, not surprisingly, she was using manual mode. I called her through her car intercom.

  “Lita,” I spoke in my calmest voice, “you missed the news. Driving isn’t permitted today. You’ll be arrested.”

  “Hi, Nick,” she said in an upbeat tone, “by the way, thanks for asking for my permission to talk. No, I didn’t miss the news. I was planning to ask you for help – I knew you were watching me. Once I get outside, please tell Kir to cover me on my drive to the city. Have him delete my electronic trace and avoid checkpoints.”

  The elevator stopped just as her car approached the open garage exit. There were no gates for me to control. I had to find convincing words to make her stop and do it quickly.

  “Lita, why the city – what are you doing? Wait …”

  She drove out onto the empty street.

  Kir’s map showed a police car a few blocks away. It was slowly cruising in her direction.

  “Lita, the police are coming. Get back to the garage. You have time.”

  She kept driving forward. There was no time to apply my negotiation skills.

  “Alright, I’ll do it. Turn on your autopilot.” She did so immediately. “Kir, take over Lita’s car. Drive away, avoid detection. Make a circle around Oren.”

  “Kir, change the direction to my city residence.”

  Kir, obviously, ignored her request.

  “Nick, please, tell him.”

  For a second, I considered driving after her and physically intercepting her car, but I dropped the idea right away. I couldn’t afford a chase and altercation in the open; it would be too much activity to hide.

  “Lita, why the city? You need to be here so we can leave with Remir.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow. I’m sorry, Nick. But I need some distance between us, between me and Oren, and everything that has happened. Don’t tell me that you don’t understand.”

  Part of me understood, but the drive was unjustifiably dangerous, even with Kir taking all precautions.

  “Lita, it’s not safe. It’s not worth it.”

  “Nick, please. Otherwise, I’ll turn the autopilot off and drive there myself.”

  “You will be arrested.”

  “It’ll give the situation an interesting spin, don’t you think?”

  I kept standing in the elevator, looking at the brightly lit garage wall through the open doors. For some reason, it seemed important to find a pattern in the shiny curves of its surface. Loss of control was a novel sensation.

  “Lita, ok – I’ll get you to the city,” I said. “Kir, go ahead.”

  “Thank you, Nick. Goodbye. Please, don’t contact me. Don’t make me physically break the intercom.”

  She disconnected and turned the flexible arm of the internal camera to face the ceiling.

  How did she manage to outmaneuver me? I asked myself riding the elevator back up to my room. There was a simple explanation. I stopped being a professional the moment she stopped being a part of work.

  The next several hours I spent in the bed looking at the white car that was moving in the direction of the city. There was no physical military presence on the roads, and Kir was erasing her image from the highway surveillance system. A couple of times he had to drive the car down a detour to avoid manned checkpoints, and one time he slightly altered the flight path of a helicopter unit, but all in all it wasn’t too bad.

  Through my chip on Lita’s shoulder I watched her face in the reflection of the glossy surface of the dashboard screens. She had the tense focused expression of someone who was trying to think through a hard problem under severe time pressure.

  She reached the city border in the late evening. Fortunately, she lived away from the center, and her residential area was sparsely patrolled. Still, I felt that my neck muscles relaxed once she drove into her building’s garage. She pulled into her spot and turned on the voice intercom.

  “Thank you, Nick,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” I didn’t even try to hide the sarcasm in my voice. I expected her to hang up, but she kept the line open.

  “Nick,” she said, “you’ve been watching me. I can feel it. I felt it on the way to the hospital. I felt it in the hotel. Please stop. We don’t have a chance if you don’t. I need to be alone.” She paused for a moment and added, “Promise – if what happened between us mattered.”

  It felt like the air I was breathing instantly became too thin. Yes, it did matter – otherwise why would I be doing any of this? “Damn you, Lita.”

  “Thank you,” she said. I zoomed the garage camera at her face, so close that I could see the reflection of fluorescent ceiling lights in her eyes and heard myself saying, “Kir, stop streaming her trace – unless, she is in physical danger.”

  Her image disappeared.

  “Now, go away,” I whispered and pressed my hands against my eyes so hard that irregular reddish spots appeared on the velvet blackness of my empty vision field.

  I lay still for a while, then got up, went downstairs, bought a packet of sleeping pills from the vending machine and swallowed the double dose right th
ere in the lobby. The desired effect kicked in shortly after I returned to my room. My eyes became heavy; I slumped onto the bed and fell into a dreamless void.

  Two emergency alerts simultaneously woke me up.

  “Nick, Lita’s in a critically dangerous situation,” Kir commented on the live feed he was streaming from the interior of the Media Center’s computer hub.

  The second line was a direct call from Lita. In spite of a residual fog from the tranquilizers, I immediately felt a bout of terror. Lita stood in the middle of a large room filled to the ceiling with server racks. She squeezed a random intercom handle in her hand and was waiting for Kir to connect me. She knew that he was monitoring all communication lines.

  A young man with a work badge clipped to his sleeve was hunched over a central console several steps away.

  “Lita, Nick is online,” said Kir.

  “You didn’t follow me, Nick. Thank you,” she smiled, but her voice suddenly broke down, “but … I don’t have much time now.”

  Kir showed me a feed from the Media Center hallways. A group of armed people ran towards the door of the server room.

  “Lita, what happened?” I whispered.

  “Nick, I had to do this. This was the only way out. It’s logical – you, of all people, should understand. If I disappear, Remir would never be sure what happened. But if he sees us together … I won’t be able to pretend and he won’t go then, Nick.”

  “Kir, play back the main events from her timeline since I fell asleep,” I said, and short video clips started replacing each other in chronological sequence.

  … Lita disappearing into her apartment. Lita picking up a landline phone…

  Now I was talking to her in real time and listening to her voice from Kir’s recording simultaneously.

  “Nick,” she was saying through the live connection, “don’t blame yourself, please. It’s not just about Remir and you. You can’t imagine how happy I am to show these pigs that they don’t own all of us. I’ve been swallowing humiliation my entire life and now I am paying them back. It’s my chance to stop feeling ugly, o stop being a coward. Being a coward is the worst thing to be.”