Bad Monkeys (12 page)

I gagged again, and my knees buckled. It was OK: I needed to check beneath the taxi anyway. Sure enough, in the shadow of the undercarriage I saw the remains of a burst soccer ball.

I got back on my feet. In the distance I could hear the school bell ringing: recess. I tried to hurry, but the best I could manage was a drunken stagger.

By the time I reached Orchard Street, the school playground was already full of kids. Arlo Dexter stood just outside the fence, slipping another soccer ball from a canvas bag. I pulled my gun and tried to draw a bead on him, but my arm wouldn’t steady.

I needed to get closer, like point-blank range. I stepped off the curb and immediately stepped back as a car swerved to avoid me. Arlo heard the horn blare and looked over his shoulder. We locked eyes. He smiled and stuck his tongue out, then raised the ball above his head and cocked his arms to throw.

A shopping bag full of soup cans caught him square in the face. He went down hard, dropping the ball, which only bounced once before Annie swooped in and grabbed it. She did a neat half-pirouette and relayed the ball down the block to another cab driver, who dropped it into an open manhole at his feet.

“Are you all right, miss?” someone asked. It was just some guy walking by; he’d missed the show across the street, but noticed me. “You should be careful waving that around,” he said, pointing to my NC gun. “The cops, especially these days, they might not realize it’s a toy until it’s too late.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”

I swayed a little on my feet, and he reached out to
steady me. “You sure you’re OK? You’re not on anything, are you?”

“Not yet,” I told him, “but I hope to be, soon.” I started laughing.

Then I looked across the street, and my laughter died. Arlo had gotten back up and had his hands around Annie’s throat; she was smacking him in the head to try to get him to let go. As they grappled, they were edging towards the curb.

“Annie!” I shouted. I raised my gun again, but this was an even more impossible shot. All I could do was watch as their fight carried them out into traffic.

This time, the delivery truck didn’t even try to stop. Arlo went down and got swept under the wheels, but Annie was knocked up and away. She flew diagonally across the intersection and crash-landed on the hood of a parked car.

She was still conscious when I got to her. I pushed my way through the crowd that was already gathering around her, and immediately launched into a line of bullshit about how she’d be OK if she could just hang on. She shut me up with a glance.

I’d like to tell you that she died at peace, relieved at the thought of being reunited with her son. But this was no Hallmark ending. She was in a lot of pain, and she was scared. Maybe just scared of dying, but maybe—I think this is it—scared that saving that playground full of kids hadn’t been enough, and where she was going now, she
wouldn’t
see Billy again, even looking both ways.

Right before she went out, she grabbed my wrist and said, “Pay attention,” one more time. Then she muttered something, which, as usual, I couldn’t quite make out. But I was in tune with her now, and so I knew it had to do with the truck that had hit her.

I looked up, and the crowd parted, and I saw it: a
black-paneled truck, idling in the distance. The driver was leaning out the cab window, watching Annie’s death scene through a pair of binoculars. Watching me. When he saw that I saw him, he pulled his head back inside the truck cab. The truck’s taillights flashed, drawing my attention to the mandrill painted on the back door.

“Hey!” The crowd had closed up again; I started pushing people aside, flailing my arms. “Hey! Stop that truck! Stop that truck!”

But no one would listen to me, and by the time I fought my way clear, it was already too late—the truck had turned a corner, and like a model train going into a tunnel, it vanished.

ONE OF THE FLOOR TILES HAS TURNED
black. She’s prodding it with her foot as the doctor comes in.

“Maintenance had to replace it,” he explains. “One of the other inmates was feeling claustrophobic. She tried to dig her way out.”

“What did she use, a chair leg?”

“A ballpoint pen. My colleague Dr. Chiang got called away in the middle of a session, and he made the mistake of leaving his belongings on the table.”

“Your colleague. So you weren’t there when it happened.”

“No, it was on one of my days off. You doubt the story?”

She shrugs. “Nice job of color-matching.”

“If you’d like, I could call maintenance back in and have it pried up.”

“Don’t bother. Even if the organization put something under there, all you’d find is an ordinary patch of floor.”

“What would they put there, though? Some sort of microphone?”

She shakes her head. “The spy gear won’t be in the floor.”

“Meaning it is here somewhere?”

She glances at the smiling politician on the wall. “Eyes Only,” she says.

“You’ll have to decode that for me, Jane.”

“I told you about Panopticon, right?”

“‘The Department of Ubiquitous Intermittent Surveillance?’”

“That’s the one. Eyes Only is one of their intel-gathering programs. It uses these miniature sensor devices that are kind of like contact lenses, only smaller and thinner—so much so that they’re undetectable without special equipment. Now in theory you could plant these things anywhere, but in practice Panopticon only puts them on eyes.
Representations
of eyes, that is: photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture…Any time you see an eyeball that’s not in an actual person’s head, there’s a chance it’s monitoring you.”

“How much of a chance?”

“Nobody outside Panopticon knows for sure. If you ask, they tell you, ‘Less than a hundred percent, but more than zero.’ It’s a joke, see? ‘Ubiquitous intermittent surveillance’ means they aren’t always watching, but they always
might
be.”

“Do you think they’re watching now?”

“I think the odds are closer to a hundred percent than zero.”

The doctor reaches to take down the photograph, but it’s fixed firmly in place. “Well,” he says, “I suppose I could get a towel or a washcloth to drape over it.”

“Don’t bother. I don’t really care if they’re watching. Besides, those aren’t the only eyes in the room.” She points to the identification badge clipped to the front of his lab coat. “And you’ve got more photo I.D. in your wallet, right? And maybe some snaps of the family?”

“They can see out of my wallet?”

“No, but they can hear.”

“The Eyes have Ears?”

“It’s an imperfect metaphor. Panopticon’s run by geeks, not poets.”

The doctor takes out his wallet and does a quick survey of its contents. Peering into the billfold, he asks: “Do they put these devices on currency, too?”

“Oh yeah. Smart money, they call that. They use it to track cash transactions.”

“Interesting,” says the doctor. “And disturbing.”

“It’s scary when it works. But that’s the other half of the joke: the Eyes go blind a lot, and they miss stuff—whole
trucks
, sometimes.”

“Who told you about Eyes Only? Annie?”

“We covered it in dream class. But I guess you could say it was Dixon who really schooled me on the subject.”

“Did Mr. Dixon work for Panopticon?”

“A subdivision of Panopticon,” she says. “One that you really
don’t
want watching you…”

I PASSED PROBATE.

I wasn’t expecting to; you’d think letting your Probate officer get killed would pretty much guarantee an F. But the Loose Ends team that collected Annie’s personal effects found a half-finished progress report that said I showed “real potential,” which I guess was enough to bump me to a D-minus.

A month later I got my first assignment as a full-fledged Bad Monkeys operative, at an old folks’ home in Russian Hill. A doctor in the critical-care ward was playing God with the senior citizens. He’d put stuff in their IVs to cause a cardiac arrest, then call an emergency code and bring them back to life. Sometimes he’d “save” the same patient two or three times before their systems couldn’t take it anymore.

He’d been at this long enough that the nurses on the ward were starting to get suspicious, and he probably would have been busted eventually, but the organization got wind of him first. Panopticon did a background check and found out he’d worked at three other old folks’ homes before this one. When Cost-Benefits heard that, they decided enough was enough.

I got a job sweeping floors on the night shift. My first
night on, I caught Dr. God alone in the break room and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

That was it for the Bad Monkeys op, but I decided to keep working at the home for a while. I needed the money. It turned out Annie’s lottery stipend was a special deal just for her; whenever I bought scratch tickets, they were losers.

You didn’t ask Bob True to provide you with a salary?

Nah. After squeaking through Probate, I figured I wasn’t in a position to ask for anything. Besides, when I thought about it, it made sense: I was supposed to be doing this for the good of the world, not for a buck. And it’s not like they had me killing bad guys every day. I had more than enough downtime to manage a second job.

So I stayed on at the home, and even took a shot at having a personal life. I made friends with some of the night nurses and started going to breakfast with them after our shifts ended. There was also this cute doctor, John Tyler, who came in to replace Dr. God. I tried to get something going with him.

Did you?

No. I’d hang around the break room with him, you know, dropping hints, but he wasn’t interested. And not that I’m God’s gift, but I figured that probably meant he was gay. Then one night when he was off-duty I was sweeping the floor outside his office and noticed the door was unlocked. I decided to snoop a little, see if I could confirm my suspicions—or if he wasn’t a lost cause, find some clue to what might float his boat.

There was nothing out in the open. Nothing in his Rolodex, either. I started checking desk drawers, hit one that was locked, grabbed a paper clip…and then, when I had the drawer open and saw what was inside, I reached for the phone.

True was waiting for me on the roof of the nursing home at dawn. Catering had set out chairs and a buffet
table, and as I came out of the stairwell, I saw a guy puttering around the tea service. I might have taken him for a waiter, except he looked more like nearsighted Gestapo: blond crew cut, black leather trench coat, and these thick pebble glasses, you know the kind they stopped making once plastic lenses were invented?

And this was Dixon?

Yeah, although I didn’t catch his name right away. He didn’t introduce himself, and I was in too much of a hurry to tell True what I’d found to insist on the niceties.

“The drawer was full of pictures,” I said. “Pictures of little boys. Not, like, hardcore stuff; they were cutouts from mainstream magazines, product ads mostly: little boys in blue jeans, little boys in bathing suits, little boys in underwear…I suppose there could be an innocent explanation, but what makes that hard to believe is how many of them there were. I mean, we’re talking stockpile,
hundreds
of images…”

“Five hundred and forty-four, at last count,” said True. “There’s also a catalog of parochial-school uniforms hidden at the back of the X-ray drawer in his filing cabinet.”

“You already knew about this?”

“Eyes Only,” True said.

It took me a minute to get my head around the concept. “You
bug
children’s underwear ads?”

“An obvious strategy for identifying pedophiles. Though perhaps not as cost-effective as initially hoped.” He glanced at the guy in the pebble glasses, who was sitting down now, stirring his tea.

“So I was right. Dr. Tyler is a bad monkey.”

“He has potential.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that so far as we know, he’s never laid a hand on a real child, or even tried to. He just thinks about it.”

“So what?”

“So, wicked thoughts alone aren’t enough to classify someone as irredeemable.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not going to do anything?”

“We’re evaluating him. If it’s warranted, we’ll arrange a Good Samaritan operation to get him some counseling.”

“That’s it? You
might
make him see a shrink?”

“I was referring to moral counseling, actually,” True said. “If his own conscience isn’t enough to keep his impulses in check, I doubt psychiatry will be much use…What is it you’d like us to do, Jane? Execute someone for keeping magazine clippings?”

“Well if you’re not going to send me in, you could at least let people know about him.”

“And beyond ruining the reputation of a man who’s done nothing wrong, what would that accomplish?”

“Jesus, True, do you really need me to spell it out?”

“I do appreciate your feelings in this matter…”

“You
appreciate
—”

“You’re a proactive personality,” True said. “When you see a potential threat, you want to eradicate it. That’s a useful instinct in a hunter, and it’s one of the reasons you’re in Bad Monkeys. My desires are a bit different, however. Like you, I want to fight evil, but I want to fight it effectively. In particular, I want to make sure that when the organization acts, it’s out of a reasonable expectation of a positive result, and not just for the sake of doing something. That’s why I’m in Cost-Benefits. And that’s why you take your orders from me.”

I didn’t trust myself to respond to that, so instead I jerked a thumb at Pebble Glasses. “And what does
he
want?”

“This is Mr. Dixon. He’s attached to Malfeasance.”

Malfeasance is the Panopticon subdivision that investigates operatives; it’s the organization equivalent of Internal Affairs. “Did I do something wrong?”

Dixon looked up from his tea. “In my experience,” he said, “the proper question isn’t ‘Did I?’, but ‘How much do they know?’ Then again, there’s a first time for everything. I’ve always wanted to meet a truly innocent person; maybe you’ll be her.” He plucked a card from a hidden pocket in his coat sleeve. “This is the current location of my office. Come by this evening at eight o’clock. We’ll chat.”

“Uh, my shift here starts at nine-thirty. Will that be enough time?”

“Eight o’clock,” Dixon repeated. He stood up. “Don’t be late.”

I waited until he’d left, then turned to True: “What the hell is this about?”

“I don’t know. Dixon called me last night, right after you did, and said he wanted to meet you. I assume it has something to do with your background check.”

“I thought I passed Probate. Why would Malfeasance still be running a background check?”

“They’re always running it.”

“And you have no idea what they might have turned up?”

“Dixon didn’t say.”

“Well, is there some way I could find out before I go see him?”

“Try asking yourself,” True suggested.

“Asking myself what?”

“Whether you’ve ever done anything evil.”

The address on the card was for a video arcade in the Mission District. I was surprised to find it open for business. I stood by the entrance, checking out the crowd—most of them were too young to be anything but civilians—and wondering if I had the right place, until this guy in a change apron came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed to a sign on the wall that read,
ALL TOY WEAPONS MUST BE SURRENDERED BEFORE PROCEEDING
.

I looked at the guy. He tugged at his earlobe, which was pierced with a monogram earring that had the letters
OMF
in gold. I gave him my NC gun. He tucked it into his apron and brought out a yellow elastic band that he slipped around my wrist. The wristband was tight and had some sort of metal contacts on the inside, and right away it started my skin tingling. While I was still adjusting to that, the guy slapped an ice-cold can of Coke into my other hand. He pointed to another sign:
FREE SODA WITH SURRENDER OF WEAPON
. Then he nodded towards the rear of the arcade and said, “He’s waiting for you.”

I started back. The Coke can was freezing my hand, so to warm it up I popped the tab and took a big gulp. It was like drinking liquid nitrogen; my whole mouth went numb, and when the Coke hit the back of my throat I spiked an ice-cream headache that made my eyes water.

The arcade seemed to go on for miles. Every time I reached the end of a row of machines, there’d be another one, and as I went farther in, things started to get strange. The kids manning the joysticks were replaced by gnomes, blond gnomes with pebble glasses and leather trench coats. The machines changed too,
Virtua Fighter 3
and
Dance Dance Revolution
giving way to games with more of a Seven Deadly Sins theme. And the images on the screens…Let’s just say, the Concerned Parents Association wouldn’t have approved.

Finally I came to a door marked
EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS
. I took another sip of Coke, knocked, and went in.

Dixon’s office had a single overhead light fixture, like a search lamp mounted in the ceiling—the bulb was like a thousand watts or something, and if it had been angled at the door instead of aimed straight down, I’d have gone blind on the spot. A long folding table had been set up in the cone of the lamplight. The left side of the table was piled with paper, mostly old-fashioned computer fanfold printout. The right side was reserved
for a sleek laptop, its screen flickering with a cascade of green figures.

Dixon stood with his back to the door, flipping through a sheaf of printout and pretending he hadn’t heard me come in. I took this for a standard interrogation tactic: he wanted me to speak first, to establish that he was the one in charge. Instead I drank more Coke, slurping it. The belch at the end seemed to get his attention.

“It’s 8:09,” he said. “I told you to be here at eight.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me about the walk in from the street. How long is this building, anyway?”

He turned around. Some sort of device had been attached to his glasses: a tiny arm extended from the top of the right lens, dangling a clear plastic rectangle a half-inch in front of it. The rectangle flickered, green, in tandem with the flickering of the laptop on the table. It was completely geeky, but it was also kind of hypnotic.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Dixon asked.

Another interrogation tactic: get me to guess what I’d done, and maybe I’d volunteer something he didn’t know about. I shrugged and played dumb. “True thought it might have something to do with my background check. So what, did you find some unpaid parking tickets?”

“Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a saying we have in Malfeasance. Not as pithy as
‘Omnes mundum facimus,’
but it serves us.”

“Well don’t keep me in suspense. What does it mean?”

“It’s an observation about human nature,” Dixon said. “One difficulty we have in running these background checks is that our information-gathering apparatus is so effective, we end up drowning in data. Of course we have technology to help sort through it, but even
machines have their limits, and a brute-force search of an entire life—particularly one that hasn’t been all that well-lived—eats an enormous number of computing cycles. So we try to find clues to help us narrow the search space…Loosely translated,
Der schlechte Affe hasst seinen eigenen Geruch
means that people are most deeply offended by moral failings that mirror their own. The minister who preaches a tearful sermon against fornication: he’s the one you’ll find sneaking out of a brothel at midnight. The district attorney who crusades against illegal gambling: look for him at the track, betting his life savings on Bluenose in the fifth.”

“If you’re trying to say that people are hypocrites, that’s not exactly a newsflash. And what’s it got to do with me?”

“Who told you to search John Tyler’s office?”

“No one.”

“You just intuited somehow that there was something to find?”

“No, I was just being nosy. I’m like that.”

“How many other offices did you search?”

“Well…none.”

“What about the nurses you’ve been having breakfast with? Did you go through any of their purses?”

“No.”

“What about their lockers?”

“No, but—”

“So you’re not
that
nosy. Why single out Dr. Tyler?”

“I thought he was cute, OK?”

“Oh. So you were stalking him?”

“No! I was just checking him out…I mean, I don’t know, maybe I did get a vibe off him.”

“A vibe.”

“Yeah, like you said, an intuition. That there was something not right there.”

“But then what about the nurses?”

“What about them?”

“Two of them have been stealing painkillers—shorting their patients’ dosages—and giving them to their boyfriends to sell. Strange you didn’t get a vibe about that. Maybe if they were taking the drugs for
personal use,
your intuition would have picked up on it…”

“Look, where are you going with this? You think I zeroed in on Tyler because I’m
like
him?”

“Are you?”

“Hey, if you’re worried I’ve got my own collection of magazine clippings, you’re welcome to search my apartment.”

“We already did.”

“OK…So you know your schlecky-affa-whatever theory doesn’t hold water.”