Breach Page 9

  The situation perplexed Emily, so she started asking people about it. It wasn’t the teachers’ fault. The school qualified for funding based on standardized test performance, so the administration naturally required instructors to teach to the test. The higher the scores, the bigger the checks. All the better if students went on to attend top-tier universities. But when Emily chatted up alumni, they told her how much student debt they were racking up. That’s when Emily realized she was halfway down a new rabbit hole.

  School was boring her out of her mind. Her classmates were brilliant and similarly frustrated, but they viewed it all as a big game. It wasn’t a game that appealed to Emily. She found her friends much more interesting. Life was a screenplay to Florence, who had been shooting and editing footage since she was eight. Even though his home life was fucked up, Javier played math like a violin, and Emily imagined his head was filled with endless glyphs. Carolyn had read more or less the entire library of classics in the original Greek and Latin.

  Unlike academic topics, people were just weird. They couldn’t be categorized, not really. They were a strange agglomeration of habits, hopes, dreams, foibles, memories, and DNA. There were no clean cuts. Everyone really was a special snowflake after all. Listening was the best way to get to know people, and questions greased the wheels.

  Which was why Emily hadn’t been paying attention when the assistant interrupted Ms. Randolph’s physics class, whispered in the teacher’s ear, and beckoned Emily. As she was escorted to the principal’s office, Emily’s questions multiplied: What had she done? Did they know she’d bought those pills from Dane? What would she do if they pressured her to rat him out?

  The principal’s face was tight. I’m sorry, Emily, I don’t know how to say this. There was an accident. Your father was killed, and your mother is in the ICU. Is there someone you can call? Frank disbelief. What a ridiculous thing to say. She had downed a bowl of cornflakes that morning while her dad told her to hurry up because they were going to be late and her mom prepped to give her big presentation. But even as Emily marshaled her arguments against the obvious inaccuracy of the principal’s statement—surely there must have been some mistake—she noticed how genuinely ill at ease he was. His discomfort was so profound that it gave her pause, and the second she stopped to consider whether there was any chance what he was saying might be true, emptiness bloomed.

  There hadn’t been a mistake. They had been hit by a bus while crossing the street to the farmer’s market. Her father was dead and her mother died in the hospital the next day. Emily wasn’t prepared to confront the infinity of her parents’ absence. Grasping for a way to corral the gaping hole inside her, Emily refused to admit she had no other relatives living in the United States, refused to return to Seoul to live with her aunt, refused to allow the hovering adults who weren’t her parents to hijack her future.

  Instead, Emily sat down in the middle of the garage. Surrounded by her mother’s tools, she had closed her eyes and imagined that the invisible systems that governed the outside world could be taken apart, rendered comprehensible, and put back together just like the telescope. She read all the paperwork, reviewed the accounts, called in favors, and played the lawyers and the insurance people and the police and the psychologists and the school administrators and the distant relatives and the family friends and everyone else against each other, constructing a self-reinforcing bureaucratic fiction to obscure the fact that she was a bereaved teenager living alone.

  Independence transformed from reaction to compulsion. Once the lies built up momentum, there was no going back. Money was a problem. She couldn’t pay the bills with the legit part-time jobs available to her as a student, so she sold pills for Dane, quickly surpassed him, and leapfrogged up the supply chain until she was setting up major distribution transactions.

  At that level, the business wasn’t about drugs per se but rather the buying and selling of anything both valuable and shady. It might be details of a biotech company’s new breakthrough molecule, an introduction to an accountant skilled at offshoring capital, dirt on a mayoral candidate, a coveted invitation to Wysteria’s next house party, or the guarantee that Port of Long Beach drones wouldn’t surveil Berth G215 between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. The specifics were fungible. This was the realm of organized crime, and the Angeleno gangs liked Emily. As a smart, socially adept teenage girl, she was the perfect combination of competent and unthreatening, able to traverse the complex political geography of warring factions and broker otherwise impossible deals.

  Soon, Emily had more money than she knew what to do with, and she spent it on the only thing she really cared about: her friends. She had a way of becoming a confidant without meaning to. Merely by finding people interesting, she earned their trust. Whatever Emily earned, she protected. So, when Florence received a death threat after posting footage exposing a secret white-supremacist rally, Emily made the problem go away. And when she found out that Javier’s junkie mom had absconded to Houston, she’d rescued Javier and Rosa and invited them to live with her. Before long, she had a house full of brilliant misfits.

  The more Emily’s influence grew, the more legitimate her operation became. It wasn’t about drugs or even trade secrets anymore. It was about favors, and she had accrued quite a tab from a long list of powerful people. The better she got at manipulating the system, the more broken she realized it was. By the time she graduated high school, she had begun to direct her influence toward repairing some of the rips in the social fabric through which her wards had fallen. Having won her independence, that became her mission.

  An owl hooted in the distance, reeling her back in from reverie. Her body was stiff and sore. Grass scratched at her jacket.

  Society was just another telescope. The feed was too. After taking them apart, Emily had left Javier to pick up the pieces.

  CHAPTER 19

  The sun burned away the morning fog until the last remaining tufts formed a fluffy patchwork above the gray-green surface of the San Francisco Bay. From this vantage in the hills, Berkeley spread out below them in a colorful grid, the campanile rising up from the leafy university campus. Emily wondered whether gangs fought turf wars over these idyllic blocks like they had in LA before the fires or whether she was just a relic from a darker age.

  However the world might have changed, her presence here confirmed it hadn’t entirely thrown off the shadow of violence. Javier walked beside her, his nervous energy palpable and incongruous in this quiet residential neighborhood full of period-revival homes.

  Ping. Another notification in her feed. Lowell again.

  I’m hosting a party next week up in the mountains. I can have a plane pick you up on Camiguin. What’ll it take to convince you to come?

  Emily hadn’t expected Lowell to go full crush. Maybe she had overplayed the seductress bit. Now that Rosa was safe, Emily could always take Lowell up on his booty call and smother the old dirty bastard in his sleep. But she didn’t have time for distractions right now. She dismissed the message unanswered.

  On the flight down from Washington, Emily had tried to find a way to bridge the vertiginous gap that separated her and Javier, but he had remained immersed in his feed.

  There is no justice, just us. Watching his fingers dance in the air, she thought about how the only honor to be found was the kind you fashioned for yourself. When politics was poisoned by corruption, nothing was more important than the promises you made to your friends.

  This cute little neighborhood was the last place on earth she wanted to be, a picturesque hell. She couldn’t be here, couldn’t face these people, couldn’t risk hurting them again. But she also couldn’t desert Javier, couldn’t be the person to walk out on him yet again. Every path, every thought turned back on itself.

  “This is it,” said Javier.

  Emily looked up at the charming cottage with the neatly tended garden. So this was where Dag had spent the intervening years. A wave of dizziness washed over her and she caught herself on the railing as
they stepped up to the door.

  They stood there for an awkward moment.

  “Are you going to knock?” she asked.

  Impossibly, Javier seemed even more anxious than she was. He probably wasn’t keen on showing up at Dag’s home with the woman who had threatened to dox Dag’s mentor. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a friendly social call. But Javier grimaced and rapped his knuckles on the door.

  The door opened, and Emily saw Dag face-to-face for the first time in thirteen years. He had put on weight, his face a little fuller and his body a little thicker. But his hair was still artfully mussed up, and his short beard had a little amber mixed into the brown. He wore a white linen shirt over khakis and where once she had seen hunger and ambition in his clear blue eyes, Emily detected an unfamiliar glimmer of contentment.

  “Come on in,” he said, and Emily flashed back to the hotel room where she had fantasized about riding Dag instead of Lowell. She hoped the disconcerting heat in her belly didn’t reach her cheeks.

  Emily and Javier removed their shoes and followed Dag through the house. The living room had been converted into an art studio, and there was a half-finished sketch on the large drafting table, a portrait of two barefoot girls wading into a stream.

  “How are the twins?” Javier’s tone sounded casual, but Emily could feel the strain underneath it.

  “A handful, as ever,” said Dag. “Layla is obsessed with architecture, which I didn’t know was on the menu for third graders. She’s always building these crazy models. And Drew is a social butterfly. I’m pretty sure she already has more friends than I’ve ever had put together. It’s staggering how different they are. Age and DNA are apparently the only thing they share.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Emily, nodding to the picture. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” said Dag. “I love ’em to death.”

  Stairs led up on the right, but Dag took them straight through to the kitchen. In addition to a number of original drawings, there was a faded photo of a Greek coastal village and a couple of smeared finger paintings. She smelled caramelized onions. Bananas, mangosteens, and avocados were piled high in a bowl, and cast-iron cookware hung from hooks above the tile counter.

  The whole home felt lived-in, and Emily had a strong sense of déjà vu. It was as if walking through the house was a physical manifestation of cracking Dag’s feed so many years before. Both were filled with thousands of traces that reflected his habits, preferences, and identity. They told his story. She imagined taking apart every millimeter of this house with a full forensics team and using the results to reconstruct that story and shape its future chapters, just as they’d done with his feed.

  Who are you? That was the question Emily had posed to Dag as he peeled away the layers, getting closer and closer to the truth of their careful manipulations. Did all the little clues people left in their wake sum up the lives they led? Did that sum encompass their identities, or was there some ineffable kernel in the leftovers, forever inaccessible? When all was said and done, who really was the man leading them through the back door of the cottage?

  Javier followed Dag, and Emily was suddenly aware of being on the verge of something. A migraine blazed and withdrew in the space of a single breath. She was caught between her fear of burning up on reentry into these people’s lives and the undeniable necessity of protecting them.

  Shaking her head, Emily stepped out the back door and into a jungle.

  Branches knit into a thick canopy overhead, the light that filtered through it soft and golden. Vines crawled and dangled everywhere. There were ferns big enough to hide a velociraptor and flowers of every hue and intensity. Her feed tagged the exotic varietals, supplying name, genus, and distinguishing characteristics. The air was humid and rich with overlapping scents of jasmine, citrus, and compost. Leaves whispered, water dripped, and Emily wondered whether, like Alice, she had just stepped through the looking glass.

  But it wasn’t a jungle.

  It was a greenhouse, built directly off the back of the cottage so that the two combined were a single symbiotic structure. It might not be an alternate dimension, but it was a world away from Berkeley. In fact, it felt a lot like the rainforest hugging the slopes of Camiguin’s volcanoes.

  Emily hurried after Dag and Javier along the path that wound through the lush vegetation. After a few tight bends, they emerged into a clearing, a coffee table at its center. A woman stood to greet them. She had curly, brown hair, was neither tall nor short, beautiful nor unattractive. More than anything, she was unassuming, forgettable. But Emily remembered her from long-ago forays into Dag’s feed and from the rare but more recent Commonwealth press releases that referenced their chief intelligence officer.

  “Holy shit,” said Diana, eyes widening as she saw Emily. “You look like you got stuck in a BDSM dungeon and forgot the safe word.” She raised a finger. “I always tell Dag to remember the safe word. If I’m ever forced to give one of those godawful commencement speeches that Javier is so fond of, that will be the kernel of divine wisdom I offer to the assembled throng of bored, horny graduates. Remember the safe word.”

  “If she attacks you,” said Dag, “the safe word is zeppelin.”

  “Baby, that’s classified,” said Diana.

  “You two get settled in,” said Dag, rolling his eyes. “I’ll fetch the coffee.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “Come on, Javier,” said Diana. “You know we can’t do that.”

  “Look,” said Javier. “You guys understand what’s at stake here.” His leg was bouncing under the coffee table. Was this pitch, rather than her presence, what lay at the root of his obvious anxiety? “I’ve been working on this initiative for years, and it’s got barely enough momentum to actually work. We’re talking progressive wealth redistribution on a global scale. A real solution to inequality is within our reach. No civilization has ever been able to do this before. It’ll raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, even the playing field a bit, make this precarious new world order a little more stable. Now that you’ve heard what Lowell’s up to, it’s even more important to get this thing implemented.”

  “You must have anticipated there would be pushback,” said Diana.

  “Pushback?” said Javier. “I’ve been dealing with pushback since I proposed the damn thing years ago. Everyone fighting tooth and nail to prevent it, even those who stand to benefit. This isn’t pushback. This is a conspiracy.”

  “If I were about to antagonize the superrich, conspiracy is precisely the kind of pushback I’d expect,” said Diana. “People don’t like other people redistributing their money, especially the kind of people who like money so much that they dedicate their lives to collecting it.”

  “They tried to kidnap my sister.”

  Dag and Diana glanced at each other.

  “We agree with you,” said Dag. “I’ve been pushing my contacts to support your initiative since the beginning. Diana’s doing the same.”

  “Great,” said Javier. “That’s why I came to you first. Keep supporting it by keeping this between us.”

  Diana shook her head. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can,” said Javier, frustration rising in his voice. “What’s the upshot of reporting this kidnapping attempt? Having you increase security on me and the other board members and our families, right? Right? Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Diana drained the dregs of her coffee and stared at Javier evenly.

  “You’re not wrong,” she said. “And if Rosa was randomly targeted, then I might be able to keep it to myself for a while. But unless I misunderstood Emily’s report, this is anything but random.” She turned to Emily. “Why did Lowell order the kidnapping?”

  “To create a point of leverage that would allow him to pressure Javier into delaying or calling off the new inequality program,” said Emily, remembering baijiu overflowing the rim of the little cup, spreading across the table.

  Javier shot Emily a wounded
look, and she shrugged. What did he want her to say? She’d already told them everything except for her own personal history as a fighter.

  Diana opened her hands. “Exactly. Lowell and his cohorts aren’t trying to collect a ransom. This is a political play to manipulate Commonwealth, and you can’t ask me to keep this intel from the board.”

  Javier clenched his fists. “Just hold off until the initiative passes.”

  “And when exactly will that be?”

  “Work with me here, Diana.”

  “What do you think I’m doing right now?”

  “You know these things take time.”

  “And you know I can’t ignore this. What if Lowell has already found other points of leverage? What if other board members suspect they might be at risk but don’t want to raise a fuss, or what if they’re already compromised?”

  “You heard Emily,” said Javier. “Lowell already has agents inside Commonwealth.”

  “Of course he does,” said Diana. “And counterintelligence is part of intelligence.”

  “So you’re saying you know about every mole?”

  “That’s not why you want to keep this quiet,” said Diana. “But I do agree that discretion is required. We’ll call an emergency board meeting tomorrow night. But we’ll do it off-site so we can limit our exposure. I’ll invite only enough to have a quorum, not the entire board. We can limit it to just us, Rachel, Sofia, Liane, and Baihan.”

  “Tomorrow night?” Javier was incredulous. “Fuck you, Diana.”

  “Hey,” said Dag. “There’s no need for that in here. Calm down, both of you.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “If I may,” said Emily. “Why is telling the board about this situation so problematic?”