Omega

15.

“Yes, they caught her,” the old man said into the phone. He swerved the big Cadillac to avoid a shuttle bus pulling into the parking lot, causing the shuttle to squeal its tires. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw the procession, the four members of M-Squad, the young man from Alpha—and her.

“I have her in sight right now,” he said into the phone, watching her dark hair, a little frizzy , bob up and down as she hurried across the parking lot toward the Directorate van. “She is…shorter than I expected.” At that moment, she looked up at the car, and he felt almost as though she were looking at him through the rearview mirror, as though a sort of current were between them, and he pressed the pedal, accelerating out of the parking lot. As he turned, his eyes followed her, still making her getaway with her comrades. “Pretty, in her own sort of way. She has a focused air about her, her mind on the things she has to accomplish. Her will is strong, I can tell you that much. I can feel it from here.”

He waited as he drove, passing a freeway onramp that was grey, dull, and overdone—just like everything else in America. “I don’t know how much of a problem her will presents,” he said, answering the question asked on the other end of the phone. “I am merely informing you that she seems to possess a mind of her own, that she is no simple dullard as easily manipulated as the goon in Iowa whom I set upon a different path. He will wake up in twenty years as an electrician and never know that I steered him from his life of crime, because he has all the self-awareness of a microwave dinner. She, on the other hand…her mind is firm in its decisions. All I can do for one such as that is begin to stir the waters of uncertainty.”

He pulled the car onto the freeway. “We will be prepared by tomorrow to finish this.”

He waited, listening, though he wanted more than anything to interrupt, to assure the man on the other end of the line that, in fact, he was wrong, but one simply did not do that to one’s boss, not in Omega. The fastest way to the gallows , he thought, and listened to the prattle, waiting for his opportunity to talk. “Yes,” he said at last, when the rhetorical question was asked, “but this is simply a choice. I know you had high hopes that they would step aside after we wiped out their human agents.” He let a smile split his lips. “No, you know I didn’t agree with that operation, and clearly it did not bear the fruit that your advisors told you it would. Because they do not know Erich Winter, his stubborn resolution.”

There was a pause in the conversation. “Erich Winter lives up to his name. His coldly analytical nature, his refusal to budge, like a frosted hinge…you were never going to receive the results you were looking for by simply doing things the way they told you to. Anyone who was close to the situation would have said so…and this is the problem with your advisors…they are too young, too unfamiliar with the old ways to deal with the old ones, who are more myth and legend to them than real.”

There was a flat pause and the old man looked up at the greying sky, at the impending approach of winter itself, of the trees, now nearly naked on either side of the boulevard he was driving on. “Stanchion is mine, my operation. I will show you. Tomorrow, we move. Tomorrow, everything falls into place. I will call you after it is done, and we will talk. I will fix this intractable mess that your young minds have created for you.

“And after that, Erich Winter will no longer be a problem.”