The Last Good Man

Time Enough

There are no sidewalks in this district, so True walks in the streets alongside parked cars tucked up against the buildings. She is cautious as she approaches the address, pausing at the corner to study the block where the riad is located, and to listen.

The neighborhood is quiet.

The street rises uphill, but other than that it’s similar to the streets she’s just passed—hemmed in by parked cars and high white windowless walls. The conjoined residences can be counted by the number of arched double doors, each pair wide enough to drive a small car through, although all of them are closed. There are four sets of doors on each side of the street. Friendly amber lights illuminate the door of the farthest riad on the left. More lights glow on two of the rooftop terraces on the right-hand side of the street. But the residence True seeks is the second on the left, and like most of its neighbors, it’s dark.

She does not want to stay in one place too long so she walks on past the foot of the street to the next block. She lets her MARC run the sky survey and again it detects only city UAVs and private network relays. No unidentified devices. No devices following her.

She walks up the next block, and as she does, she digs a small case out of her daypack. Inside is a soldier from the origami army. Tamara calls it a sparrow though it doesn’t look like one. Its dark-brown avian wings are powered by button batteries packed into an oblong body with a shape that reminds True of a fishing lure, the sort with eyes painted on to make it resemble a fish. A triangular tail serves as a stabilizing third wing. It has a wide-angle camera and radio-frequency sensors, along with software to interpret what it finds, and it’s agile enough to fly in tight spaces or securely perch in a hidden niche—so it’s useful, despite a limited battery life. She syncs it to the MARC’s display and when she reaches the top of the target block, she launches it into the air.

Without guidance, the sparrow spirals upward. True lets it climb until it’s higher than the houses. Then she uses her data glove to send it shooting swiftly down the street and over the outer wall of the target house. A circuit of the riad’s rooftop terrace shows no one there. One end of the terrace is sheltered beneath an ornate tiled roof held up by graceful white columns. Heavy curtains, tied back by tasseled ropes, hang at the corners. Sheltered beneath are a daybed, upholstered chairs, and a stairway that drops out of sight behind a clean white wall. The rest of the terrace is open to the sky. There are lounge chairs, a patio table with a folded umbrella, and three huge, hip-high terracotta pots presently empty of flowers. At the terrace’s center, a well looks down into the interior courtyard.

The sparrow’s video feed is distorted, super-wide angle, but True can make out soft garden lights in the courtyard below and a central fountain with four small trees around it.

No one is in sight.

Tipping her hand forward, she directs the sparrow to descend. A balcony overlooking the courtyard surrounds the lightless second floor. Behind the balcony are rooms with uncurtained windows and folding doors all pushed open. She guides the sparrow in a circuit, identifying sitting rooms and bedrooms, but no one is there. The beds are bare mattresses and there is no clutter, nothing personal, even in the bathrooms.

And there are no surveillance devices. None that the sparrow can detect.

She explores the ground floor next, where there are two large salons and a modern kitchen. Again, no one, and no evidence of anyone—no dirty dishes in the kitchen and no ready lights indicating active electronics anywhere—but also no sense of abandonment. The house is clean, the trees and the fountain in the courtyard well tended. She thinks maybe this is a vacation rental being cleaned and prepared for its next booking.

She summons the sparrow back as its battery reserve shades into orange. She considers calling Shaw again, but she has already stood in one place too long, so she descends the steep street until she’s outside of the target. Her visor picks out and highlights a tiny camera lens mounted above the arched double doors. She’s only a little surprised when the riad’s doors start to swing silently open.

If the doors opened all the way, the entry would be wide enough for a small car. But they swing inward only far enough to allow her to enter… which she does. On the other side is an arched passageway to the courtyard. It feels like walking into a trap, but her momentum carries her past both fear and good judgment. The doors close behind her, the click of an electronic lock audible past the burbling of the fountain.

She takes out the pistol and walks through all the rooms in the house, repeating the survey she just made with the sparrow, confirming that no one is home. By the time she reaches the rooftop terrace, she has decided that Shaw does not live here, that he never has. It’s not right for him. It’s too open, subject to surveillance from overhead and, given the open-air rooms, impossible to secure against creeping robotic beetles.

Still, he sent her here. The house recognized her. She is supposed to be here.

She wonders: Why this place? and Will he come? She could try calling him again, but surely he must know she is here?

Dawn is an hour away. She decides she’ll wait that long, and no longer. If he’s going to come, he’ll come by then.

She changes out the sparrow’s batteries. An ornate iron railing tops the low wall enclosing the terrace. She secures the sparrow’s perching feet around the rail’s lowest rung, positioning the device so that its wide-angle video includes both the street and the sky. The fresh batteries will allow for hours of surveillance if the sparrow is passive and does not fly.

She goes downstairs, stopping in at the kitchen. There’s no food, just bottled water in the refrigerator, but her dust-dry mouth and her aching skull make it clear that water is what she needs. She takes two bottles to the courtyard. In a shadowy back corner beneath the shelter of the second-floor balcony there is a cluster of furniture: a padded bench with carved wooden legs, low coffee table in front of it, and on the other side of the table, two cushioned chairs with a porcelain block table between them. The chairs face the courtyard, with a view of the passageway and the front doors, so True chooses one as her base of operations and sits.

Relief floods her body, the gratitude of muscles that are tight and tired. She acknowledges, too, a deep sadness for things lost and broken. She takes off the visor and leaves it on the little block table to hibernate. Opening a bottle of water, she sips it slowly.

After a few minutes of waiting, she flirts with the idea of checking her messages. A fierce anxiety follows. She hasn’t checked her regular accounts—voice, email, or text—since she walked off the plane in Manila, knowing there would be an emotional payload and not wanting to be distracted by it. But now the thought is in her head. Nagging at her. She resists for a time, ten or fifteen minutes. Then she slides her tablet out of her thigh pocket.

With the decision made, she doesn’t hesitate further. She switches on voice and text messaging, and authorizes her email to download, priority only—priority being determined by Ripley.

There are fewer than she expected. She scans the lists, finding two voice messages from Alex, both date-stamped soon after she sent her last email. She doesn’t listen to them. She’ll listen to them later, when this is over.

After he got no response to his voice messages, he sent an email with the subject line, I need you to call me. Then an hour after that another, pleading, CALL ME. I need to know you’re okay.

As she reads this, her chest tightens. She squeezes her eyes shut for just a few seconds. But she leaves the emails unread, afraid of the weight they contain.

Nothing from him since. Understandable.

She presses the cool water bottle against her hot cheek and moves on.

Only one message from Lincoln, a voice message, date-stamped ninety minutes after his flight departed Manila. Her breast rises and falls in a deep sigh. No hiding from the content of this one. Lincoln has followed her to Rabat and if he has let drop any hint of his plans or his intentions here, she needs to know it. She plays the message, her anxiety ramping up yet again at the quiet fury in his raspy voice. “God damn it, True. You need to stop and think what you’re doing. Shaw Walker is not a hero, he’s not a savior, and he’s not a substitute for Diego. He is a dangerous, unstable man…”

Anger flares. “I know,” she says aloud through gritted teeth. “I know, I know. Don’t tell me what I already know.”

She puts the tablet down, drinks water, and evaluates. She’s tired and emotionally worn and her temper is short—none of which is an excuse for poorly considered tactics. She’s not going to start making excuses. “This is on me,” she says. “My choice. My responsibility.” But she’s never operated in such isolation before.

Time to change that?

She hisses at the thought. No way is she going to call in Lincoln. Do that, and she won’t see Shaw again unless there’s an open coffin at his second funeral.

A new thought comes: What about Tamara?

Tamara might be willing to run a command post. True could link her up to the MARC, and then she’d have someone to shadow her, to watch over her shoulder and witness, and to bring word to Alex if it all goes south—

No.

Tamara is not a soldier. If True is going to connect with anyone, it needs to be someone who’s been on the front lines before. And, it occurs to her, it should also be someone Lincoln can’t fire when this is done. A cold smile touches her cracked lips. As it happens, she knows someone like that, someone who’s got nothing else useful to do.

She picks up her burner phone and puts through a call to Colonel Colt Brighton. It’s the middle of the night in the DC area but the old man is a night owl and he’s got enough sense of adventure that he’ll usually pick up an unknown number.

He must be bored because the phone rings only once and he’s on the line: “Tough luck,” he says. “She gave you a fake number.”

“Don’t say anything else, Dad,” True warns him. “If you’re not alone, end this call, excuse yourself, and call me back.”

Two seconds of silence, then a whispered “Fuck.”

The call drops.

She waits. Less than a minute later, the screen flashes an incoming call. She picks up.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Where are you?”

In terse sentences, she tells him. He’s not shy with his opinion. “You’ve gone off the fucking deep end.”

“Maybe so, old man, but this is about Diego. You willing to shadow me or not?”

“Shit. Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Good.” Colt is arrogant, abrasive, and domineering—she would never willingly put herself under his command—but he’s not shy on the line. He’ll back her until this is done.

“Do not tell anyone,” she warns him. “Not until this is over.”

“Over one way or another?”

“Yeah.”

“God damn it, True. You have always been a pain in the ass, but I do not want to see you die.”

“Good to hear, because your job is to help me stay alive.”

“No matter how stupid you are.”

“Nothing ever changes, huh?”

“God help us all. What’s the fucking plan?”

“For now I’m going to set you up with two devices, one to watch the street, one to watch this courtyard. But once he’s here, you don’t talk. You just witness. And if I don’t get home, you let Alex know what happened.”

Forty minutes later, the sound of Colt’s low, old-man voice in her ear startles True out of a catnap: “You with me, girl?”

“I’m here,” she breathes, straightening in the cushioned chair.

“I’ve got one armed individual, male, approaching your location from the lower end of the block.”

“Roger that.”

He’s watching the video feed from the sparrow. She reaches for her MARC to confirm what he sees: a lean figure of a man, with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. The angle is too steep to show his face, the light too dim to be sure of the color of his hair.

“That him?” Colt asks.

“Got to be.” She wonders where he’s been and what he knows, and why he’s carrying the Triple-Y. Does he know Lincoln is here? She swipes with her data glove to clear the MARC’s screen. “Quiet now, old man. I’ll talk to you on the other side.”

She takes off her TINSL before Colt can object, toggles it off, and tosses it into her daypack. Then she’s up and moving sideways to the shelter of a column that supports the second-floor balcony. The pistol comes out of her pocket as the front doors swing open, riding on their silent mechanisms.

The passageway amplifies Shaw’s soft voice: “You getting jumpy, True?”

“Fair assessment,” she admits over the rock-club rhythm of her heart. She peers out from behind the column. Her MARC gathers enough light that she can see he’s still dressed as he was earlier in the evening, and he’s still wearing his off-brand visor. It’s the Triple-Y that’s new, and a small daypack on his other shoulder.

“Put the gun away,” he says. “I told you before, I got you under my wing.”

She steps out from behind the column to stand under the open sky. They face each other across the courtyard. “You went dark on me,” she accuses.

“You were taken care of, until you skipped.”

“Communications failed. I was not acquainted with a mission plan. Under those circumstances, I felt more secure making my own way.” In a more conciliatory tone she adds, “So far as I could tell, I wasn’t followed.”

“It’s quiet out there,” he agrees. “Now put the gun away.”

She does it, returning the pistol to her pocket.

“Where’s your car?” she asks as he crosses the courtyard.

“Down the hill, around the corner.” He speaks just loudly enough to be heard over the burbling fountain. “You knew I was coming. You got eyes on the street?”

“Yes.” The courtyard too, but she doesn’t mention the beetle hidden in plain sight beside a broken tile at the mouth of the passage, where its swiveling camera lens can watch the courtyard and the front door. His narrowed eyes and half-smile tell her he’s not fooled.

She hands him a bottle of water. He takes it and drinks half. She’s uncomfortable in the open so she returns to her seat beneath the balcony. He eases his pack to the floor, then sits in the second chair, the block table between them, stretching out his long legs, holding the Triple-Y cradled in the crook of his arm. “This Li Guiying,” he says. “She has skills.”

True takes off the MARC and rubs her aching forehead. “Yes.”

He turns to look at her through the clear lens of his visor. “So why did she hire those two amateurs?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her. Does it make sense that she would use her own name?”

“If she was in a hurry. If she wants you to know.”

“Maybe it was just a mistake.”

“Not the first.”

His focus on Guiying is oddly reassuring. It tells her he doesn’t know yet that Lincoln is here. Good, because she needs this time.

She says, “Earlier tonight you were surprised that I already knew you and Diego were abandoned, left to die in Nungsan. But you were not abandoned by your country, Shaw. I want you to know that.”

“Yeah? I’ve heard that speech before.”

Which, all on its own, is interesting because it implies he’s been in contact with some element of the American government. CIA, maybe? It wouldn’t surprise her to learn he’s done work for them—dark and dirty work—but she doesn’t pursue the question. That’s not why she’s here and maybe she doesn’t want to know.

“I haven’t talked to anyone else tonight,” she assures him. “Except for a police officer, who asked if I was all right.”

He takes another sip of water, looking thoughtful.

She tells him, “We had no idea you were alive, until Tadmur.”

“How did you work it out?”

“Guesses and gossip and gut instinct.” She doesn’t want to tell him about Miles. “And if you were alive, that meant the story I’d been told about Nungsan was wrong. I wanted the truth, so I asked a friend in the State Department. A few discreet inquiries were made, whispered answers were given. There’s no proof, but there is a belief that some faction of Chinese Intelligence knew at the time exactly where you and Diego had been taken. They chose not to share that knowledge, they used disinformation to steer our people away from Nungsan, and in the end they obliterated the village. No one on our side knows why. No one could tell me why, Shaw. But you know why, don’t you?”

His answer is gruff, but spoken without hesitation. “Yes.”

“Tell me, then.” She leans forward to look at the sky above the open courtyard, where a few stars still hide behind the haze. Has the night begun to pale? Dawn can’t be far off. She says, “I think there’s not much time.”

“Time enough.”

He says that, not knowing Lincoln has come.

“Did you get a look at the kamikaze drone tonight?” he asks.

It’s not a question she expected, not a reminder she likes, but she plays along. “I saw it. The fuselage was flattened, with long wings mounted on ball joints. Tilt rotors, four jointed legs. Rogue Lightning emblem.”

“You saw all that?” he muses, sounding impressed. “You’ve got a good eye.” Then he explains, “I copied the basic design of that kamikaze from the mechs that hunted us in the forest that night.”