Lydia paces the reception room. They don’t have time for this bollocks. He could be leaving the city; he might already have left. Her instincts tell her he won’t have done, but recent events have shaken her trust in her instincts.
She’s also desperate to get all this over with so she can get to a neurologist and find out if what’s happened to her is permanent. She still can’t hear or speak to the Logi and she’s scared. She’s never heard of anything like this happening before, they didn’t mention it at LSTL.
On the bright side, Ivan has managed to find her a clean shirt, a polo with blue and brown horizontal stripes. It’s not the kind of thing she’d usually wear because she’d assume the stripes would make her look fat, but she rather likes it.
She’s cheering herself up looking at the footage people have posted online of her drive through Manhattan, and pulling clips in the hope she can make a supercut of the whole trip from beginning to end, when her glasses tell her she’s got a call from Marat at the agency. She answers it.
“Is it important?” Lydia asks. “I’m sort of busy here.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Oh, god—it’s a long story, and I don’t mind telling it to you, but right now—”
“I’ve had the NYPD here—they say you robbed their evidence store?”
“No no, Madison was told she could take it, but they were dragging their feet and—look, I was just doing my job.”
“It’s not your job to drive a diplomatic car at a hundred through the streets of Manhattan.”
“That’s not true—I never went above eighty. Maybe eighty-five. Look, you’re always telling us our first duty is to the Logi. Not to the cops. So I did what I thought was right. Sir.”
Marat sighs. “There’ll be an investigation—”
“Another one? Oh goody gumdrops.”
“But that’s not why I called.”
“So that was just small talk, was it?”
“I need you to accept a change of assignment. Could you stop laughing, please?” he adds impatiently.
Minutes later, Lydia and Madison are leaving the embassy via the front door. Two cop cars are parked on the street, leaving a space just big enough for a diplomatic car between them (not the one Lydia drove here, because that one needs repairs), and Lydia notices a third cop car parked on the opposite side. The way from the door to the diplomatic car is lined with cops standing at a distance specified in the communications between the NYPD and the embassy. Every one of them turns their head towards Lydia and Madison, and every pair of eyes watches them from behind those dickhead aviators.
The situation is this: Madison is immune from prosecution for her actions. The evidence is on Logi territory now, the NYPD can’t force her to return it and, given the fury over their failure to protect the body, have accepted that any protest over this would not be looked kindly upon. Lydia is not immune, and while they can’t prosecute her for aiding the removal of the evidence, since she was working at Madison’s behest, they can get her for dangerous driving. Yet she cannot be prosecuted for this while actively employed by a member of embassy staff, and the cops at NYNU overstepped their authority by arresting her. So Madison instructed Ivan to call Marat and offer Lydia a temporary secondment to work as Madison’s translator. Lydia accepted, meaning she’s free to walk out—provided Madison is with her.
Of course she cannot work as Madison’s translator at the moment because she can’t translate. But the NYPD doesn’t know that. And for their current purposes it has to be Lydia who goes to this meeting.
She wonders if they might be able to stop on the way and pick up something for her headache.
All the way there, Lydia checks they’re not being followed or watched. The embassy made it clear that any police observation or interference in Madison’s business would not be tolerated: a little talk of moving the embassy to Chicago got the mayor’s office on their side. But Lydia still doesn’t trust them to stick to it.
Their destination is a house in the Meatpacking District: Like a lot of the houses on this street, it was clearly a shop or restaurant at some point. The commerce in this part of the city died off long ago, leaving row upon row of eccentrically laid out living spaces. Lydia and Madison have come without prior warning, and they have to hope he’s still here.
This would all be so much easier if they could just give his name to the police and let them do the rest. But giving his name to anyone might throw away their last chance to resolve this.
Lydia rings the doorbell. They wait.
Just as she’s about to ring again, a voice comes over the intercom. “Hello?” Lydia can hear the uncertainty as Anders speaks. He’ll know it’s her. She wonders if he knows anything about how events have progressed since this morning. Hopefully he’s been lying low and has had no contact with anyone.
“Hi, I’m here with Madison from the Logi embassy?” says Lydia, adopting a bright professional tone she never normally uses, ever. “She’d like to apologize for not having been in touch sooner, but everything’s been a bit up in the air since, you know.”
“Oh yeah, yeah. I was so sorry to hear about that.”
“Thanks, yeah, it’s been a tough week—but we don’t want it to get in the way of plans for your event, because we really feel it would be a great tribute to Fitz if it all went ahead.”
A pause. Will he take the bait?
“I’m glad to hear that,” he says.
“So if we can come up—”
“Sure, sure.”
The door slides open. They step inside.
Anders is upstairs. The décor preserves some original features of the shop it used to be—there’s a vending machine over there, a display stand for shoes by the window, a sign pointing the way to the customer service desk hanging from the ceiling … actually, Lydia wonders if these are all original features of the shop, or if they’re original features taken from other shops.
As Lydia and Madison cross the floor towards Anders, he rises from the giant (about two meters in diameter) beanbag that lies next to the window and invites them to take a drink from the vintage vending machine. Lydia declines, and there’s nothing Madison can drink anyway.
“Anything else I can get you?” he asks, walking to a cocktail cabinet and gesturing at its wares.
“We’re good, thanks.” Lydia reminds herself not to take her eyes off him. She wants to record everything he does and says. She also reminds herself to smile. He’ll surely suspect something might be amiss here—it’s getting on for early evening, an odd time for a professional appointment—but it would be more suspicious if he told them to go away. “Sorry for dropping in on you unannounced like this—”
“No no, it’s fine,” says Anders, mixing himself a highball.
“We were just running a little early for the theater, and Madison suggested we take the opportunity to speak to you.”
“Oh?” he says, before sipping his drink and turning to address Madison. “What are you going to see?”
Lydia leaves a brief gap as if translating for Madison and listening to her response, while in fact using this time to bring up Shows Near Me on her glasses, inwardly cursing herself for not doing this on the way here. At least by not talking to Madison she’s able to keep a clear head. “A World Of No,” she says.
Anders nods. “I found it an excessively obvious interpretation of the novel, but the songs are good. See what you think.”
“Interesting. And”—Lydia puts a hand on her heart—“speaking for myself now, please let me apologize for my behavior last time we met.”
Anders turns to Lydia. He’s obviously still furious about it, but he waves a magnanimous hand. “Water under the bridge. So,” he says, turning back to Madison, “my event…?”
“Yes,” says Lydia. She looks around. It’s just the three of them here. There’s no reason not to pull the trigger on this, and she should do it while she has the chance. “Specifically what we’d like to talk to you about is, er, we uncovered one of Fitz’s last projects while going through his paperwork, and it’s very interesting, and we think it could be a great addition to your event.”
“Right.”
“Yes, in fact, it’s a very surprising project. It’s a veearr.”
Anders pauses. “That is surprising.”
“No one knew anything about it until now,” Lydia continues. “Did you know?”
Anders slowly turns back to Lydia and smiles. “Why would I know? I’d never met him until the last night of the festival.” He turns back to the cocktail cabinet, puts his drink down and drops more ice into it. He kneels, opens the hatch and searches through the bottles stored inside. “I’m not sure it’d be the best fit for my event, I’m afraid.”
“You did say you were hoping it would be pan-cultural,” says Lydia.
“But with the emphasis very much on performing arts.” Anders moves a bottle aside and reaches to the back of the cabinet. “Theater, music, poetry, dance—” Then he spins around, a small pistol in his hand. He fires it and it makes the loud, hollow thok noise printed guns usually make. Lydia shouts Look out to Madison, forgetting she can’t do that anymore, and throws herself aside, landing on the beanbag. Her headache comes roaring back.
Anders is a poor shot and his bullet embeds somewhere in the shoe display: he swings his gun around and finds Lydia again, but she rolls aside and his second shot buries itself in the beanbag. Lydia lashes out with a foot and connects with Anders’ shin—he cries out in pain and loses his aim—
And Madison’s arm arcs down, striking a precise blow between Anders’ elbow and his wrist, and Lydia’s pretty sure she hears his bone break before he drops the gun. The pitch of his howl increases, supporting this theory. He gathers his wits and realizes all he can do now is run for it, so he lurches away, trying to pass Madison—but she just sticks out her arm and sweeps him back onto the beanbag. He instinctively puts his broken arm out to break his fall—and he screams even louder, and doesn’t stop.
Lydia gives Madison a thumbs-up, amused that Madison’s main role in all this has been to act as her hired muscle.
Madison points at the floor. Lydia looks in the indicated direction and sees the gun lying in the jaws of a (fake?) bearskin rug. She scrambles to pick it up before Anders recovers, but as she points the gun at him she realizes there’s no danger of him fighting back. He’s still whimpering on the beanbag, his face screwed up against the pain—and, she suspects, also because he’s reluctant to confront the situation. But she needs him to confront the situation.
“You really fucked this up, didn’t you mate?” she says.
“She broke my arm,” he replies. “You have to call me an ambulance.”
“Do we? I mean you did just try and kill us, you remember that?”
Finally he opens his eyes and looks at her. He’s weeping, snot runs from his nose and there’s spittle on his lips. “Are you gonna kill me?”
“I won’t lie to you, Anders,” Lydia says, weighing the gun in her hand (she’s never held one of these before—it’s so light). “I feel like I want to.”
Anders lets out a despairing moan and cries some more.
“I mean, I saw what you did to my boss’s head.”
“I didn’t do that. I swear. I wouldn’t know how.”
“OK, I believe you—but that wasn’t the part that really caused him pain, you know? It was what you did to him every day. He knew it was happening, you know that?”
Anders mutters something about how sorry he is.
“And we haven’t even got started on how you used him to lie to me, and the almighty shitstorm you tried to cause, using me as—”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Was it not?”
“No—Booth just hired me to narrativize it.”
Lydia feels like breaking his other arm. “Booth hired you to what?”
“They had the basic elements, like the game, and they found me the suicide girl to set up as the killer. It was my job to come up with the story and make the connections and lead you to them.”
“Why you?”
“Well, as I mentioned, I have a background in devised theater, and—”
“Wait—those other people I met, Ondine and Marius, and Todd—were they actors?”
Anders nods.
“But Booth’s real?”
“You know she complained about some of the detail? Said it was getting too convoluted?” He emits a short laugh. “I couldn’t make it too easy for you, could I? You wouldn’t believe it. Also I had to make a lot of it up on the fly, like, I had to react to what you were doing, and I had to work with whatever was available so some things just fell by the wayside—”
“You’re saying this was just a job?”
“Yeah. I mean I was able to bring something of myself to it, but—”
“But Booth was working with other people, yeah?”
He goes quiet.
“You said ‘they’ before—‘they’ had the basic elements. Like, she didn’t make the game, did she? There’s a whole group behind this, and they’ve got people on the inside at the NYPD, right?”
Anders remains quiet. It occurs to Lydia he may have a line to the cops on a shortcut and they may already be on their way. She might not have long. She crouches next to him.
“You know you’re absolutely fucked, don’t you mate? I bet they told you no matter what happened, as long as you kept quiet, they’d make any trouble go away. But the problem is you’ve not kept quiet, because you just told me you did it and other people were involved—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Afraid you did. Did you think they’d have swooped in to save you by now?” Lydia glances up to the window. She doesn’t know if they’re on their way but they’re not here yet. “No sign of them, is there? Because they’re in serious shit with the embassy so they’ve hung you out to dry. They’ll circle the wagons and leave you out in the cold.” She knows she’s mixing metaphors here, but on the other hand Anders is just the sort of person who’ll be wound up by that so it’s all to the good. “It’s so easy to paint someone like you as a random nutter. They don’t care about you. They’ll deny everything, cover their tracks and leave you to take the fall.”
“But the head—I couldn’t have stolen it, I couldn’t have adapted the helmet, I don’t have the skills—”
“Yeah, I’ve got a feeling your accomplices will conveniently never be found. Doesn’t matter who you tell. Unless of course it’s us.”
He looks puzzled. “You?”
“We’re looking into this on behalf of the embassy. They’re not gonna trust the cops to pursue it after all this. They’re gonna push for everyone involved to pay, right? So the cops aren’t the ones you want to cut a deal with.” She doesn’t have the authority to offer what she’s about to offer, so she hopes the Logi honor it. She nods in Madison’s direction. “She’s the one you want to cut a deal with.”
Anders goes quiet. He sobs a little more, then collects himself. “What do you want to know?”
“The names of everyone you know who’s involved.”
“And after that, will you take me to a hospital?”
“We’ll take you to the embassy and get you a doctor.”
“I need to go to the hospital.”
“If this is as big as you’re saying it is, you’ll be much safer at the embassy—that’s the deal. So are you going to talk or not?”
They talk in the car, just in case he passes out from the pain and she doesn’t get to talk to him for a while. He slumps in the backseat and Lydia turns to face him.
Anders explains the whole operation from his point of view but he doesn’t actually know a lot of names, which figures. Apart from Booth he spoke to some of the developers of the translation helmet. His police contacts were two of the cops stationed outside the residence, and he thinks the other two were involved.
“But someone must’ve made sure they got put on that detail,” says Lydia. “And then there’s the sabotage of the manhunts, and the theft from the morgue … could they have done all that?”
Anders shakes his head. “Doubt it. And even if they could, I could tell they weren’t calling the shots. Decisions were coming down from someone else.”
“So who killed Fitz?”
“All I know is it wasn’t part of the plan.”
“What? How can it not have been part of the plan?”
“The plan was already in motion, it was accelerated after he was murdered. They were gonna position a different Logi as the guy behind it all, I don’t know who, but they saw an opportunity and took advantage and changed the plan. That’s why they needed me, they needed a new narrative fast. I don’t even know if they know who killed him.”
“Seriously?”
“Look, if they told me who killed him I’d have factored that into the story. That’s why I had to link Jene into everything, we needed a martyr who wouldn’t be able to confirm or deny any of it. I think if they knew the real killer, they’d have made that a part of it, kept it all watertight.” He smiles. “I did OK, didn’t I? It all hung together and had an emotional realness, I think. How was the girl who played Ondine? I wasn’t sure she was right for the part.…”
But Lydia has stopped listening. If they didn’t kill Fitz, who did? And why?