Final impact

She wondered if there was a letter from JFK somewhere in that mail mountain out in her kitchen. She hadn’t seem him in ages, either, and he’d hopefully be getting home soon. Maybe she should call him, like he’d said.

Curious now, she turned to the other documents, instantly recognizing a DNA graphic and wondering what the hell this was about. Less than two minutes later she knew: with her head spinning and her stomach lurching, she rushed over to the toilet bowl in her en-suite bathroom to vomit.

Snider, the war hero she’d help create, was the killer, or at least one of the killers of Daytona Anderson and Maseo Miyazaki.

He hadn’t been tried, of course, but the documentation was damning.

Where the hell had it come from?

And then, asking the question, it became clear.

From her lawyer. Maria O’Brien. The West Coast Quiet Room controller.

With shaking hands, sniffing to clear her blocked nose, she read the note again.

Call me if you need a hand.

Julia Duffy, the Quiet Room agent, opened the drawer of a bedside table and retrieved a flexipad. Rosanna’s old Samsung.

She powered up and walked unsteadily over to the phone, removing the jack and hooking the Samsung into the phone network via a plug-in adaptor. Keying in a code on the touchpad, she waited while software agents negotiated their path through the old copper wire network to a black server somewhere in LA. As the pad logged in, security software at both ends engaged and began an elaborate verification procedure.

After a long wait, a chime told her she had a message.

Unable to stop herself she looked back over her shoulder. The apartment was empty, as she had known, rationally, it had to be.

Julia opened the message. A vid-mail that would hard-delete after she had watched it. It was O’Brien.

“Sorry, babe,” she said. “I have something for you, for a change. Snider, as you’ve gathered. He’s unfinished business. We can’t officially sanction him, of course. But you can do your thing with the data I’ve sent through. Good luck. I’ll see you for lunch next time you’re in town.”

The screen folded in on itself and the pad beeped three times to let her know the file had been erased at a quantum level.

All the fatigue that had threatened to drag her low vanished as she began to sort through the papers.

She had already hardened her heart to the task ahead.

As much as she had liked Snider, there was no chance of her turning this one down. They were in a war here. Not a shooting war, exactly. Not like the one that had just ended, or the next one that seemed to be coming on them like a fast-moving hurricane front. But a war nonetheless.

In his own dim way Snider had probably known that. Sifting through the papers, it seemed obvious he hadn’t acted alone-that he’d probably been under orders of some sort. She began to arrange the pieces of the puzzle on her bed.

He wasn’t an enemy combatant. He couldn’t be sanctioned.

But he could be destroyed as a man in front of the world. Left with nothing but his shame and humiliation. An effective Sanction 5, if not an official one. And in her experience these things tended to end the same way anyhow.

They certainly had with Hoover, her last Quiet Room target.

Julia Duffy unplugged her flexipad and hooked up the phone again. She placed a call to the night editor. He answered on the second ring.

“Hey, David. It’s me, Duffy,” she said.

“Hello, Julia. I thought you were at the big dinner tonight. What’s up?”

“Same old same old, Dave. I’ve got a story we need to run. Nobody’s going to like it, but we need to run with it anyway, okay?”

The editor sounded unsure. “Well, it’s too late for tomorrow’s issue, Julia, we-”

“Don’t worry. I don’t need tomorrow. I probably won’t file for about two weeks. I’m going to have a lot of research to do. I just need you to write me up as being out on a job tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay. Where are you going?”

“The Zone.”