Generation of Liars Read online

  “Why did you let her go?” I wailed. “That’s the woman who murdered Jamie in Brussels.”

  “I know. Don’t worry, I’ve already been keeping an eye on her.”

  “Alice?” I could hear Rabbit’s voice generating from the Stink bug on the floor. “Are you still there? You should have destroyed the servers by now and gotten back to the car. Alice, do you hear me? Employees are about to start reentering the building.”

  My foot eclipsed over the Stink bug and I rubbed the sharp stylus of my heel into it until it disintegrated into shards.

  “What’s the matter?” Pressley asked. “You don’t want your friend to hear us?”

  I kicked away the metallic splinters from under my heel and locked my eyes onto Pressley’s. “I have a feeling the conversation we’re about to have is one I would like to keep private.”

  “You’ve been thinking about me, haven’t you, Alice?”

  “Oh, wipe that arrogant smirk off your face.”

  “It was a good kiss in that book vault in Brussels, wasn’t it?”

  “Shut up. You and I need to have a little talk.”

  “About our relationship?”

  “There is no relationship. You need to stop showing up places and screwing up my life.”

  “Alice, quit playing games, let me take you to the embassy and we will get everything straightened out, and then I can take you home. It will be like none of this ever happened.”

  “Trust me, when I’m done with you, you will be praying none of this ever happened.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  I let a devious glare cross over my eyes. I dived to the floor and grabbed the briefcase. I gathered the flasks up in my arms and took three big steps back so that my ass bumped against one of the servers. “These are why,” I replied.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m smoking the servers.”

  “Stop what you’re doing,” Pressley shouted, tension broiling in his vocal cords. “On behalf of the United States Government, I order you to drop those flasks.”

  I jiggled one of the flasks out in front of me so that the liquid inside sloshed around. “Stay put or I’ll splash you. This is acid, so I hope the clothes you’re wearing aren’t anything you mind spoiling.”

  “Acid?”

  “Yup.” I unscrewed the bottle caps and began sloppily pouring the acid over the large, metallic machines. As soon as the acid came into contact with the mechanics on the server, I could hear the innards of the machines sizzling, and a swirl of dry, icy smoke plumed into the air.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Pressley informed me, suppressing a cough into his shirt sleeve. “Now I have to arrest you.”

  I flung the empty flasks over my shoulder, letting them clatter like coins, and strode towards Pressley. “Lunch break is over. Back to the corporate grind.” My shoulders breezed by him, but Pressley seized my arm and pulled me close to him so that his lips brushed the tip of my nose.

  “This isn’t cute, Alice. Let’s end this today. While you’re back in the States, let me help you get your life straightened out.”

  The noisy chatter of employees making their way back into the building began to encompass us. My lips skirted Pressley’s chin. “That’s assuming I want to be straightened out.” I stiffened my fingers so that my hand resembled a sturdy plank and drew it up from my side to chop the bend inside Pressley’s elbow. His arm jerked, surrendering his grip on me. I spun around him, whirling towards the door, and scampered back through the corridor I had taken to get the server room. I ran to the elevator that would take me back up to Cibix’s main lobby. Pressley was running close behind me. “Come on, come on,” I pleaded to the inanimate elevator doors.

  The doors popped open and I tumbled inside the elevator and frantically pressed buttons. With not even a second to spare, the heavy doors snapped shut on the cusp of Pressley’s nose. I sunk my chest into a deep, heaving breath of relief.

  The relief was short-lived. “Hello there,” a voice called from behind me.

  I was not alone in the elevator. My body jumped. I slowly turned, and standing behind me was Mr. Midlife crisis from earlier that morning, comb over and all. His pudgy body was slacked against the back corner of the elevator.

  “Hi,” I said, turning away. I could feel his small, untrustworthy eyes burrowing into the back of my pants.

  “You an intern?” he asked. I pretended not to hear, instead feigning a deep study of the shiny elevator control buttons. “Because if you’re an intern, I can teach you a few things about business.” My peripheral vision could see his gut hanging over his belt and the last vestiges of thin, greasy hair combed over his shiny cone head.

  “No thanks,” I coldly replied.

  “I like the blue hair. It must mean you have a wild side.” I felt the heat of his body encompass me as he moved closer. The palm of his sweaty hand brushed up against my ass. I chocked back a web of bile in my throat. My eyes flew open and I threw my hand out and slammed on the red emergency button. The elevator came to an abrupt stop with a violent thrust that sent him wobbling backwards.

  I slowly and methodically pivoted backwards to face him. “Excuse me?” I asked.

  The man’s face was momentarily brightened by a faulty premonition of intimacy. His tongue flicked over his lips and he told me, “Yeah, I know a few business tricks of the trade I would be willing to share with you.”

  I took a purposeful step forward and my eyes set upon him like raging lasers. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You liked it,” he said.

  “While you’re enjoying your midlife crisis, I am going to kick you in a place that’s going to cause you a real crisis.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean, baby?”

  “Baby?” I hiked my leg into the air and torpedoed my foot into the crotch of his tan khaki pants. The man folded over himself, letting a despairing grunt escape his lips.

  “You bitch,” he wailed. He staggered back to his feet, but I quickly cut him off with another swift kick to the groin. When he unfolded to his feet the second time, I pinned both my hands to the crook of his tacky silk necktie and tugged it with enough force to rupture it from his body. I swung the tie in my hands, like a pelt taken in battle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “This,” I said, balling up the repugnant tie in my hands and forming it into a lumpy sphere. A hard swallow trickled down his throat, nudging his Adam’s apple under his skin. I shoved the tie into his mouth. He gurgled as his face turned a concerning shade of blue, and I eased up, letting the spit-soaked tie fall to the floor.

  I turned around and checked my reflection in the shiny gold elevator doors and ran my hands over my skirt to smooth the puckers. The elevator doors parted open and I gave the man, crouched and shaking, one last warning look before I walked out into the lobby.

  “You bitch.” The words were hissed as the doors snapped shut behind me.

  The lobby was buzzing with employees slowly making entrance back to their desks following the fire drill. Shoulder Pads was crossing the lobby with a troop of equally horrifically dressed coworkers. I shrunk my posture and hoped she wouldn’t notice me.

  “Hey you! Yoo-hoo.” Too late. She had caught me. “Are you leaving already?”

  “Yeah,” I called back. “I just don’t think office life is for me. Too dull.”

  “A shame. I was just breaking ground on a customized desk calendar for you. It was going to have cats on it. I was going to ask you if you preferred Siamese or Calicos.”

  “I’m not much of a cat person,” I replied before spinning around and making a run for the front exit. It was still drizzling outside and the fog from the rain robed the streets in a charcoal haze.

  The black rental car pulled up alongside me. The window rolled down, revealing a set of beady tawny eyes that roved beneath honeyed lashes. “Get in,” Rabbit said.

  I climbed inside the
car and gave Rabbit an ear to ear smile. “Mission accomplished.” I noticed that Rabbit had a pissy look on his face. “Who fragged your hard drive?”

  “Alice, I just saw Pressley Connard book down Avenue of the Americas on foot. He was holding a bunch of empty acid cans.”

  “Oh,” I said. A grunt of fake surprise was made.

  “Did you see him inside Cibix?”

  “Nope.” I wasn’t going to fess up to being in close proximity of Connard twice in one week. “But I definitely saw blondie again. How does she do it? It’s like she has ESP hidden inside that big hair of hers.”

  “I can’t believe she got us again.” Rabbit slammed his fist into the eye of the steering wheel. “I wonder who she works for. These jobs are getting pretty crowded between the mystery blonde and Connard.”

  “Well, I know for certain that she doesn’t work for the government.”

  “What makes you sure?”

  “She wanted those servers cooked as badly as we did.”

  Rabbit flicked on the windshield wipers and scanned his mirrors. “I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news for us.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter today. Today, I smoked the servers with nary a setback.” I undid the buttons on my blazer and tussled my hair. “So I’m calling it a victory.”

  “The area’s hot, let’s get back to the Hilton and lay low.” He glided the car into the city’s late-morning traffic. “Lucky for us, Cibix will want a low profile on this.”

  “You don’t think Cibix is going to initiate an all-out manhunt for the perp who creamed their servers?”

  “Unlikely, since Cibix kept the fact that they were working on Project Nine a secret. The last thing they wanted was to spark a war between their competitors to rush development on their own recovery systems to pitch to the government. The also kept the information exclusively on those servers instead of cloud storage, in order to prevent leakage. This attack won’t be reported to the police, it will go directly to Homeland Security. It will never make the news.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Homecoming

  MY THUMB BRUSHED over the mounded buttons, tracing the contours of the ordered labyrinth they spread into, touching the shiny plastic surface, which was the same cosmically black shade as infinite galaxies.

  “Rabbit?” I called out.

  “What is it now, Alice?”

  “Why do you think hotels glue the remote control to the night table?”

  “It’s so nobody steals it.”

  “My gosh,” I said, making my fingers dance away from the buttons, “what has the world come to?”

  Rabbit’s head poked out from the bathroom door. “Alice, you of all people shouldn’t have to ask that.”

  I flicked the television on, just in case Rabbit was wrong about the incident at Cibix not making the news. “I know, I guess I was just kind of hoping the real world wasn’t quite as subversive as our little world.” I shrugged myself free from the stuffy black blazer.

  “Anything on the television about us?” Rabbit called out over the sound of the toilet flushing as he emerged from the bathroom.

  “No news on the happenings at Cibix, but the weather girl is warning about a lightning storm headed for New York City this afternoon.”

  Rabbit plopped down next to me on the edge of the bed and we both watched as the camera panned to the news desk, where the anchor announced that due to the storm all flights out of JFK and surrounding airports were grounded until further notice.

  “That sucks,” Rabbit said.

  “So much for a speedy getaway,” I said.

  Rabbit got up from the bed and powered on his laptop. I shut off the television and laid my head on the pillow, listening to the dripping rain tapping against the storm gutter outside our window. When I closed my eyes all I could picture was Pressley standing inside the server room at Cibix. I felt guilty about the way I had hurt his arm. He had looked good, and I told myself that it should be a crime to hurt someone who looked that good. Except that Pressley was a government agent, so technically it was.

  I could hear the rain outside picking up, battering against the exterior walls of the hotel. Dreary rainy days had always made me homesick in Paris. But now I was homesick and I was in America, close to home.

  “Rabbit?

  “Yup, Alice?”

  “Since no flights are leaving New York, at least until late tonight, do you mind if I borrow the car?”

  He pushed out a sigh. “What do you need the car for?”

  “I want to go out and get some stuff to fix my hair. This blue looks cheap, and you know I don’t handle cheap well.”

  “Can’t you just walk to a drugstore from here?”

  “Where do I start with all the things wrong with that question? First, I do not put drugstore dye in my hair.” That was a lie, because ever since that first day I met Motley and he brought me to the Rite Aid inside Grand Central, I had exclusively put drugstore dye in my hair. “Second of all, I’m not travelling around New York City on foot in broad daylight to be spotted by any Cibix employee who saw me today.” I hoped Rabbit couldn’t tell from the weakness in my voice that what I really planned to do with the car was far more risky.

  “But, you don’t even drive. I’ve known you three years and I’ve never seen you drive once. You said it was against your policy.”

  “You’re right, Rabbit, I don’t drive. But I know how. And today I choose to. Policy change is officially in effect. Deal with it.”

  “Fine, Alice, do whatever you want. Just get out of my hair and be careful out there.”

  He pitched the car key to me and I raced outside with it. I whirled through the hotel’s turnstiles and into the raw weather. The rain was coming down at a slant, and it had managed to pour onto the floor of the parking garage so that the rental car was sitting in a small puddle. I slid in behind the wheel and turned on the car’s defogger. I relaxed into the driver’s seat and lit up a cigarette while I waited for the glass to clear. I used my heel to kick out the front seat’s middle console and pull up a tangle of wires. I knew Motley would have made sure the rental car was outfitted with GPS system to track us. I finished pulling out the GPS, tossed it out the car window into the puddle, and gunned it out of the parking garage.

  * * *

  Sitting behind the wheel of a car felt strange, since I hadn’t driven in three years. I went slowly at first, but I was up at ninety miles per hour by the time I merged onto the Tappan Zee Bridge. I fiddled with the radio dial until I landed on a good station and melted into the driver's seat as I glided down Interstate 95 straight into Connecticut. The rain coming down all around me felt like an artillery of heavy bullets pelting the car.

  When I turned off at the exit for Fairfield, Connecticut, forty-five minutes later, I was glad I had been smart enough to rip out the GPS. Motley had no idea that I grew up in Connecticut, and I intended to keep it that way. I had always told Motley that I grew up in some Midwestern town, and I had told Ben the same lie at the coffee shop when he asked. Somehow people asked less questions when you told them you were fleeing the cow poke. Connecticut was the place where my life had begun twenty-one years ago, and the place where Heather Gilmore’s life had ended three years ago.

  I took a right off the exit and pulled my gold aviator sunglasses from my bag and pushed them up on my face. I came into the center of town and scanned around, remarking the sameness from when I left, but also the subtle changes. I scooted past the town green, which appeared solidified in time; a banner heralding the upcoming Friday night football game stretched over the gazebo. I took everything in. My old high school, Berto’s grocery, the post office, they were all still there just like I left them. It felt surreal as I took the once-familiar route to my parent’s house. There was a deep, misty fog that seemed determined to blot out my memory of the route, but I knew the way, trudging the nearly deserted roads enveloped in that hefty, disorienting fog.

  I pulled onto Francis Terrace, snaking down it slowly and
purposefully, as though the road was opening up before me as a ladder to an enchanted kingdom. Francis Terrace was situated in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with mostly big colonials featuring protracted front porches and bright chandeliers in the windows. Not much had changed in three years, but I noticed the changes, the little ones that nobody would blink at unless this was home. The For Sale signs, the green house that had been repainted white, the barren flower garden in my parent’s front yard that had once been flourishing.

  Andy Warhol once said something about people forgetting what emotions were supposed to be at some point in the 1960’s, and he didn’t think they ever remembered. Growing up, I always told myself they probably all moved to neighborhoods like this and got amnesia. My parent’s house was almost at the end of Francis Terrace, a Tudor-style house with a garage attached by a breezeway and not much growing in the yard. I trolled by the house slowly as hot tears boiled in my eyes. Aside from the lack of my mother’s flowers, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it from the last time I had laid eyes on it.

  I steadied the car to a stop and lifted the parking brake so I could light up a cigarette. A violent wind gust made the house’s clapboard siding applaud in the breeze. Peering at the house, I could see the television in the living room fuzzing through the window. I could make out the outline of the giant brick fireplace, and I wondered if my picture was still on the mantle. Were my old swimming medals still on my bedroom wall? Was my little sister Maribeth’s high school diploma framed in a gold box like mind had been? My eyes scanned upwards to the second level and I noticed that beyond my old bedroom window everything was dark. I blotted my leaking eyes and let the flame from my Zippo race over the tip of the cigarette dangling from my lips.

  Then lightning struck.

  Without a warning, a portion of the overhead sky crackled into an explosion of light. A bold brightness of aurora-caliber splendor filled up the expanse around me, spooking me enough to drop my cigarette and let it roll under the brake pedal as I gunned the gas. My stunned heart pounded in my chest. When I hit the turn onto the main road, I was shaking and sobbing with my white knuckles clenched around the steering wheel.