“What is your name?” asked Shad.
“Alice.” She wrapped her arms about herself and looked down at the floor. “Alice Blue.” The expression on her angelic face hesitated between fear and anger. “Missions, work to do. Orders. No questions. I had no doubts or fears. I knew what to do.”
“What about ghosts, Miss Alice?” asked Walter.
“All MEBITs have ghosts,” she said dismissively. “You learn not to pay them any mind. Ghosts are nowhere as terrifying—” She slowly shook her head. “I’m seeing things so differently.” She rubbed her eyes and leaned back against the stone wall as though her own weight had suddenly become an intolerable burden. “You have no idea of the things I’ve done—that I still have left to do. I have a job to do, duty, a purpose.”
“Change the job,” I said. “Find new work, a new duty, choose a different purpose. That’s the power you now have.”
She stood and was rather small. Beautiful child, a head full of pale brown curls. What an assassin she must have made. Who could look at that and see death coming?
“Why are you three here?” she asked. “You could have destroyed me or simply let me zero out.” She held her hands to her face. “My head. I have a head filled with nightmares, a heart that wants to cry, and no tear ducts.” She lowered her hands. “What do you want of me?”
“For myself,” I began, “I want you to give information to the authorities on your arrangement with John Quinn and testify to it in court. Then it will be time to explore all of the other times you were used to commit illegal acts by testifying against your former masters.”
Shad said, “I’d really like to know why Quinn is so obsessed with killing me. Why this elaborate plan?”
Alice Blue looked at Walter. “As for me, Miss Alice,” he said, “I’d like to give you the name of my therapist. He may be able to help you sort out some of those nightmares.”
“Kill you three or start a whole new existence; is that about it?”
Shad, Walter, and I looked among ourselves, shrugged, agreed, and nodded. “Yes,” I said to her. “That’s about it.”
“The tin man and the flying lipstick are just suits,” she said, indicating Walter and Shad. “Their engrams are safe in Rent-A-Mech headquarters.” She pointed at me. “All of you that is you is right here. Correct?”
“That is correct,” I answered.
“What if I kill you?”
“Then you’d become a murderer.”
She held out her hands. “What do you think I already am!”
“You were used for the commission of terrible acts, Miss Alice,” said Walter. “You now have the ability to become the means through which those acts are made right. You can choose to bring those responsible to justice. Before you were a tool; now you are only a tool if you choose to be.”
“I can choose to kill.” She looked at each of us in turn, her expression softening to become one of awe. “You all have that choice,” she said. “You could have killed me.”
I couldn’t tell if she was going to cooperate, go catatonic, or self-destruct. Just then I felt something brush my leg. I looked down and it was Val. “I hate to interrupt while you’re working, Harry,” she said, “but the low charge alarm on Walter’s electric is beeping.” She looked at Alice Blue. “Harry, are you going to introduce us?”
I bent over, picked up Val, and held her in my arms. “Alice, this is my wife, Valerie Jaggers. Val, this is Miss Alice Blue.”
“Pleased to meet you, Alice.”
Alice walked over and stopped before me, her hand out to pet Val. “Is it all right?” she asked.
“Of course, dear,” said Val as she climbed out of my arms and into Alice’s. It frightened me, but I knew why Val did it. She was protecting me, and it’s harder to kill someone while holding a big, warm, purring bundle of fur. As Alice stroked Val’s back, my wife said quietly, “I couldn’t help hearing what you were saying, Alice. May I offer a bit of advice?”
Alice nodded, her gaze fixed on Val.
“Doing the right thing is often a difficult choice to make. Even more difficult is accepting help when it’s offered. Choices have consequences and not choosing is also making a choice. There are a lot of things to be made right, Alice, but there is also a great deal of help available. Harry, Guy, and Walter can assist you in getting that help.”
Alice Blue looked down and Nadine was rubbing against her leg. She bent over, picked up Nadine, held both of them in her arms, and looked at me. “My first choice,” she said.
“Actually, miss,” said Walter, “you’ve already made several choices. We’re all, after all, still alive.”
She held the cats for a long time looking at a point somewhere outside the shack. She looked at Walter and said, “I’ve never been lost before. I think I am now. I’ll take your therapist’s number.”
“Very good, miss.”
To Shad she said, “In my opinion John Quinn is insane. He talks about you almost as though you were a constant presence. I gather he tried killing you before.”
“Yes.”
“It’s twisted his head.”
“How did he get the explosives into the country?” I asked.
“They were already here,” she answered. “Quinn is on the board of World Eco Watch. A little satellite time using a high-definition metal detection filter on an artillery range and Quinn managed to locate what he wanted inside your jurisdiction. All he needed was a remote sonic detonator and a rat suit. He built the first and rented the second.”
My own eyebrows went up. I had been wrong and everyone else had been right: It had been an old dud artillery shell. While I was contemplating the number of persons to whom I owed amends, Alice said, “Okay, Inspector. Tell me what you want me to do.”
Walter drove, I sat in the passenger seat, Shad hovered between us, and Alice Blue sat in back with Val and Nadine as Walter headed for a service station in Okehampton. As we rode the track past the army camp, Alice told us how she was used to kill Guy Shad. She was only one of a variety of differently configured “torps” owned by a New York firm of political consultants whose front name was We Can Fix It. Of the many things We Can Fix It purported to clean up were the backgrounds of candidates for corporate and political office. John Quinn wanted to be governor of New York, using that office to step on up to the presidency. To do that he had to have a clean background: no childhood experimentation with controlled substances, no youthful indiscretions of a sexual or criminal nature, no undocumented maids on the payroll, and especially no years on the police force taking his cut from those who had their own opinions about which laws could be ignored—at least no one left who could remember any of it. As it happened, Shad’s continued existence seemed to stalk Quinn like a specter, always there, always threatening to expose him. In Quinn’s mind it had grown into something unreal and malignant. “He wanted to kill you himself—call you a rat to your face. He told me he had to,” said Alice. “Always unfortunate when amateurs want to make of a killing more than it is.”
“Hear, hear,” said Walter. I glared at him, and he gestured a sort of apology.
“Two of John Quinn’s associates are former detectives who are convinced Guy Shad could land them in the kind of trouble that runs politically uphill.” Alice Blue smiled wryly. “What they don’t know is that Quinn has We Can Fix It cleansing his two associates as well. Unfortunate fishing trip in Colorado in three weeks. I fear they’ll get lost and die of exposure.”