Episode 99
[Author’s Note: We now return to Rin two days after the events of Episode 93.]
(Washington D.C., August 9, 2019)
Rin stared at the ceiling fan. She wondered why so many of the apartments she stayed in had them. Did she unconsciously pick places because they did?
This particular fan had a languid air. It felt disloyal, waiting for an opportunity to betray her — or at least shirk its duty. The thing was probably biding its time until the temperature became scorching. Otherwise, its betrayal would go unnoticed. What would be the point of a betrayal which went unnoticed?
The fan would wait until just the right moment, then imperceptibly slow until the room grew unbearable. It would revel in the spectacle of the desperate, sweating occupants casting about for relief.
However, it would find itself disappointed. Rin would not be affected by such things. Worse, the plight of Katrina and the kids would only serve to delight her. This would anger the fan, which surely wanted everyone to be miserable. What good was there in dishing out discomfort if someone else stole the joy of it?
Maybe the fan would spin up in a fury, hurtling off its axis and into her head. That would be a worthy end for the thing. Rin would respect such a fan and such an end.
For some reason, she felt no urge to kill it. There would be a certain satisfaction in watching the fan’s frustration. More satisfaction than watching the damned blades turn ever so slowly. She snapped herself out of her funk. This was not the time for fan watching.
After years of comparable leisure, Rin had suddenly found herself quite busy. Though her various organizations and employees always required a certain degree of attention, they ran autonomously for the most part. Aside from the occasional crisis which demanded her personal attention, Rin could be as indolent as she wished. Responsibility was optional, just as it was supposed to be. Now, it wasn’t.
Had she harbored no concern for Daryl’s well-being — or obligation to protect his family — the slight was still one Rin could not ignore. The proverbial gauntlet had been thrown down, and it was immaterial whether the government truly understood what it had done or to whom. If it had neglected to know its enemy before rashly provoking her, that was its own fault — along with everything which befell it as a consequence. Rin’s part was merely to ensure that this consequence was exemplary enough to give pause to any future regime in which the coming centuries saw fit to breed arrogance. Insolence could not go unanswered.
Her hesitance, such as it was, derived solely from her uncertainty that the gauntlet had been thrown down. Even now, it remained plausible that the abduction of Daryl was unrelated to her. He was an ex-soldier, and such men generally racked up enemies until they made the wrong one. She had planned to be that one, but perhaps the universe felt differently.
Daryl had hunted Proteges with Rin, burgled and interrogated his way around the world with Sree, and probably tangled with countless ruffians prior to either. Rin had not inquired too closely about the years he had spent tracking her down. Once she had concluded that Karkov helped him, the details of the boy’s quest were of little interest. Most likely, he had fought and fucked his way through the intervening decade. No doubt, it would make a compelling coming-of-age novel, and Daryl could furnish the role model desperately needed by pampered contemporary youth.
Contemporary? Perhaps Rin was overthinking things. Maybe it wasn’t Daryl’s past which had caught up with him but his present. Was that numbskull actively involved in something dubious? Just because he seemed squeaky clean to her investigators didn’t mean he actually was. The boy had been trained by Rin and had proved skilled enough to track her down. Twice. If he wanted to appear squeaky clean, it would take more than a glance under the covers to find the stains.
Nor was it likely that he had dropped his guard. Even though Rin had vanished from his life, the boy certainly wasn’t foolish enough to believe himself safe from her. But this was not all. He had a family now, and nothing made a man more cautious and craven than fatherhood. Hopefully, it hadn’t made him incompetent too. He had allowed himself to get kidnapped, so perhaps it had.
No, that was unfair. Whatever other possibilities existed, the preponderance of evidence suggested that the kidnapping was her fault. Rin wouldn’t do Daryl the double injury of blaming him for becoming an unwilling device against her.
Rin briefly flirted with the possibility that Katrina’s activities had somehow invited trouble, but the idea was laughable. That woman was squeaky clean, so squeaky and so clean as to be pathetically boring and utterly unworthy of the man she had ensnared. Rin hadn’t spent all that time training Daryl just to see him domesticated by Jane Average.
Daryl probably was in a state of constant vigilance just because he was married. Wives were always problematic. Even if criminality wasn’t on her radar, a wife would be inclined to suspicion for other, obvious reasons. Rin had seen firsthand how easily this one was moved to jealousy, a quality which surely had not escaped Daryl’s notice.
There was no fiercer opponent than a clingy housewife. It served the boy right, though. He had picked his opponent and abjured the honor bestowed by a far more worthy one. Now, he would be henpecked to death over many decades instead of enjoying a sudden, unpredictable death at Rin’s hands.
Had she misjudged him? Maybe it was not her but the life worth living that he had rejected. She wondered whether he had been dragged into that life by happenstance, only to find himself dissatisfied with it.
Usually, that sort of life ended before dissatisfaction became an option. Perhaps Daryl simply had suffered the misfortune of surviving too long. It brought to mind something a Roman orator once said. Upon hearing Alexander the Great described as the greatest general in history, the man observed that Rome had sired many generals of higher caliber. They simply had the misfortune of living long enough to experience defeat or disgrace. Alexander’s greatest victory was dying young. Had Daryl lived long enough to suffer the ignominy of discontent? There had been many poignant points at which she could have ended his story, yet Rin felt no regret at having neglected to do so.
Yes, this could very well be it. Maybe he had picked the girl next door in an effort to force himself toward normality. Perhaps he hoped that if he no longer could be his old self then that old self would vanish.
Rin made a mental note to give his new self a thorough thrashing. What the hell was wrong with his old self? At least, that old self had been a man. His new self probably wasn’t even worth killing. Unless … what if this new self was doing something particularly unsavory? Was it all just an act? The thought pleased her.
Rin stopped herself. All this speculation was ridiculous. What exactly did she imagine the boy was involved in? He worked at a company she owned, surrounded by her employees. At home, he was beset by his clingy wife and kids. The guy probably considered quiet time in the bathroom the highlight of his day. On top of all of this, he was under surveillance by Rin’s own investigators. Yet, there had been no whiff of anything. Daryl simply didn’t have the space to be a criminal.
Of course, it didn’t take much to be a criminal these days. Between the countless layers of government and the myriad laws and regulations governing every aspect of life — with no way to even know them all — pretty much everybody was doing something illegal all the time.
Heck, an unpaid parking ticket or bounced check could land someone in jail. And if that someone was an immigrant and there was even the slightest irregularity in his paperwork, things could deteriorate rather quickly.
However, none of that would result in an unnamed government agency conducting a covert rendition. Instead, some bored cops would swing by, maybe tase Daryl a few times and rough him up a bit, and haul him in front of a judge. Sure, he could disappear into America’s modern gulag archipelago, but he would do so quietly and with lip service to proper form. No black cars, no goons in suits, and no snipers.
There just were too many irregularities. They had been waiting for somebody to show up at his family home in Suburbia, USA. Yes they had been woefully unprepared, but they weren’t surprised by her protections. That one goon had mentioned “specials”, by which he surely meant Proteges. No matter how many times she reasoned through the evidence, Rin reached the same conclusion: the whole thing had been staged to get to her.
The key question remained whether Daryl was alive or dead. If they had just wanted to send a message or get back at Rin for something she did, his mutilated body would have been found in an alley. Since they were being coy, they must want something from her — and that boded well for the boy.
Serving as a hostage was better for Daryl’s health than the alternatives. Only a complete fool would destroy their only bargaining chip. This didn’t rule out torture, or what passed for it these days, but that was okay. A little torture would build character. He’d probably feel alive for the first time since descending into suburban family hell. Heck, he might even remember what it was like to be a man.
What they wanted from Rin and what they knew about her were irrelevant. All that mattered was that she was the target. They had taken Daryl to get to her. This illuminated her path quite clearly. A challenge had been issued, and a challenge could not be ignored. The only real questions were how and when to kill everyone involved. Those and what to do about Daryl’s family. Abandoning them to their fates would make things easy but uninteresting.
Anybody could reap their way through a field of humans, especially at their current density. Long gone were the days of protracted revenge quests. Three minutes on the internet, a few hours in the air, a knife in the throat, and the deed was done. Then, just rinse and repeat until the list was exhausted. It hardly made for a compelling saga, and Rin found the prospect singularly unappealing.
To make things worse, the list in question would doubtless be quite long. In fact, for each name she crossed off it, several more were likely to appear. An inexhaustible list did lend an epic quality to the affair, but the sheer tedium involved defied any effort to romanticize the thing. There just were too many people. Rin groaned at the mere thought of it.
Modern weapons of mass destruction would help, but she did not have access to any. Maintaining a low profile was incompatible with acquiring such devices. The financial fingerprint alone would give her away.
Well, she wouldn’t exactly be keeping a low profile once she started mowing. However, involving her organizations would be a mistake. The more effectively she decoupled them from her … personal endeavors, the easier it would be to reconnect to them once she became unrecognizable.
This wasn’t her first rodeo, but it would be the first of this scale. Just because the work would be slow and tedious and quite complicated, didn’t mean it wasn’t a rodeo worth… Where was she going with this rodeo rubbish? Just because … Fuck it. She couldn’t even come up with a decent analogy and stewed for a while. She grabbed her coat and stormed to the door, only to stop and return to her seat in a huff.
Rodeo or reaping or mowing, it didn’t matter. If something was necessary and worth doing, it had to be done. But that didn’t mean it had to be done without forethought. Swinging a scythe around would feel good, but it wouldn’t accomplish much. She’d just send the wheat scurrying… Did wheat scurry?
Rin decided to give up on the analogies. She was so bored and annoyed that her thoughts didn’t even make sense, and that was no way to start a project. Especially, if she hoped to save Daryl. This was the sort of enterprise that required careful deliberation and would be doomed by anger or impulsiveness. It was precisely the sort of thing she hated.