The Last Good Man

Free Will

Do what needs to be done.

She checks herself for bloodstains, but she’s clean. The pistol is still in her pocket. Logic tells her to get rid of it but instinct’s advice is the opposite. She decides to hold on to it.

She puts her visor back on, then instructs the cab to pull over. The navigation screen shows her still a half kilometer from her planned destination. She notes the address, then resets the screen. The cab doesn’t ask for payment, so presumably she’s been riding on Shaw’s credit.

She gets out. As the cab drives off, she starts walking. Not toward her hotel, not yet. She wants to know if he’s watching, if she’s being followed. She walks past expensive apartment complexes towards the ocean, waiting for him to call.

He doesn’t.

After a few minutes she calls him again.

No answer.

It’s very late. The streets are lined with parked cars but empty of traffic. She stops in front of the dark display in a clothing store’s window. Activating the MARC’s sky survey function, she turns in a slow circle, but the program picks up only a single municipal UAV. No private devices at all.

Too bad she’s gained the attention of someone on the ground. She takes off her visor, slipping it into her right pocket to obscure the shape of the pistol as a police car glides up beside her. The window goes down. The officer—she is a woman—leans over to speak out the window in stern and heavily accented English: “Are you well, ma’am? Have you lost your way?”

True answers in Arabic phrases: “Shokran, ana kewayisa.” Thank you, I am well. She shows the officer her passport and her hotel keycard. Tourists should be handled gently and left to their foreign ways whenever possible. So the officer bids her goodnight. True is sure, though, that she has become an object of interest for the municipal UAV on patrol overhead.

She reviews her choices:

Return to the hotel—where she’d be easy to find if anyone is looking. Or head for the airport and hope to get a flight out before she’s tied to tonight’s incident. By some calculations that would be the smart move. But she walked out on Alex when she came here, she broke the bond of trust between herself and Lincoln, and she wants something back for that.

She wants the truth from Shaw Walker. All of it.

In that context, the watchful eye of the municipal UAV is the least of her concerns. Until the local police can link her to the unwitnessed crime in the warehouse district, she is just another lonely middle-aged tourist.

She walks on, slowly, pondering the question of Li Guiying.

The robotics engineer used to be employed by Kai Yun but she left the technology company years ago. Six years ago? Seven? True is uncertain. It never mattered before. She considers calling Guiying, asking her straight up, What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing having me followed? What am I to you?

Before she can decide if this is a bold or a foolish move, her tablet buzzes with an alert. She pulls it out of her thigh pocket. Finds a message from the beetle left on watch back at her hotel. From its hidden perch on the hotel’s façade, it’s been recording everyone who’s gone in or out of the hotel tonight. And it’s finally found a set of familiar faces—faces that are absent from most public databases but that exist within the private collection True has compiled, and that are associated with a private military company.

She has just passed under a canopy at the front of a closed café. She backtracks until she’s in the canopy’s shadow again. She gets out her reading glasses, huddles over the tablet to hide the screen from the view of security cameras, and studies two images. Both were taken from an awkward angle, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to read the tags to identify the team filing in through the hotel’s front entrance. Lincoln’s face is the one she registers first, his scars enhanced by shadows. He’s looking up, almost directly at the camera, like he knows it’s there, or suspects.

What in hell is he doing here so soon?

He should have gone home, dealt with the aftermath of the bombing. But he didn’t go home. He couldn’t have. To reach Rabat only hours after her own arrival, he must have booked a seat during the trans-Pacific flight and flown straight out of Los Angeles.

Just to stop me from finding Shaw?

She casts her gaze across the rest of the team and thinks that his presence here could be vendetta, and not an official ReqOps mission. He’s brought Rohan with him, and Felice. That’s understandable. Both are skilled and aggressive—and single. But he’s got Khalid too—a respected soldier of course, but also ReqOps’ newest recruit. If Lincoln is planning an operation against Shaw Walker, Khalid should not be part of it, not without months of training.

The fifth face in the picture worries her even more. Miles Dushane. What is he doing here? He’s an ex-Ranger, sure, but he’s no part of ReqOps and he’s not to be trusted, not after what he’s been through as Hussam’s prisoner. True refuses to believe that Lincoln recruited him.

She blanks the screen, straightens up, takes off her glasses. At least there’s no indication that Alex came with them. Thank you, God, for that.

She considers going back to the hotel, confronting Lincoln—but dismisses the idea. Like Shaw said, she’s not Lincoln’s girl anymore. She has her own agenda and she’s in deep. Deeper, after tonight, and she’s not done yet.

She calls Shaw. Again he doesn’t answer. His nonresponse provokes her. She wonders: Am I being toyed with or betrayed?

Out of spiteful insistence she tries the call again, whispering, “Answer, damn you. We are not done.”

He doesn’t answer.

She texts: We have unfinished business. You promised not to disappear.

Nothing.

She reconsiders the address where the cab was meant to take her. She tells herself that in all likelihood it’s a random address. Still, it’s her only lead. She slips her glasses back on and uses the tablet to find it on a map.

From above, it’s a rectangular building, the roof open to a central courtyard. She shifts to street view. From this angle, she sees a private home in the Moroccan style, a riad, with its focus turned inward to the open court. Two enclosed stories are topped by a low-walled terrace on the roof, with no windows facing the street. The riad shares its side walls with the neighbors. All of the houses on the block are riads, looking exactly the same, which tells her this is a modern build. Cars on both sides of the street are parked so as not to block the large, arched doors of each residence.

Is this his home? she wonders. Or a random address?

Is he there?

She puts the tablet away, swapping it for her MARC.

It’s not the time to be thinking about free will, but she thinks about it anyway as she sets out on a path projected by her visor, a path she needs to follow. It’s not a choice, really. It’s the gravity of what happened in Nungsan that has locked her on this course, leaving the concept of free will as nothing more than an abstract academic exercise.