Null Set Read online

  four

  YOU’RE ON the job, I reminded myself as I stumbled to my car and drove home, trying to keep my mind from cleaving along fault lines. You can’t afford to lose it; you’re on the job: Attain technology. Do math. Fight crime.

  Was it really a job if I’d assigned it to myself? Had I ever successfully been able to do that before?

  I needed an objective, now. Something to dig into and stop myself from slipping. Usually I turned to liquid medicine when things got this bad, but—

  I’m working, I tried to insist. I don’t drink while I’m working. I don’t …

  I got through the door to my current apartment and stumbled to my computer like a parched person groping for water. But neither Pilar nor Checker had emailed me anything yet. Nothing to grasp onto. Nothing to keep me—here—

  I flipped over to an academic journal website. Pulled up a new modern algebra proof that had been making a splash. Sometimes that was enough, when combined with the promise of a pending case.

  This time, the lemmas and equations stared back at me mockingly. You used to be able to do this, they seemed to say. You used to. And then you forgot.

  Just like everything else.

  No one knew how much of a mathematician I wasn’t. I might have been able to do mundane calculations faster than a supercomputer, but somewhere along the line, any true higher mathematical intuition had been burned out of my brain. The emptiness festered, a blistering hole I’d never be able to bridge.

  Compared to that, having lost pointless episodic memories was an insignificant nothing.

  I started aggressively scrolling through the proof, as if I wanted to tear the virtual pages through the screen. It wasn’t even right—the authors had made a fundamental error propagating through the whole pack of nonsense and pretending to truth, and nobody had caught it. Suddenly angry, I scribbled an obscene note mocking their attempt and tacked it into a comment. I signed it with the name of a legitimate computational theorist I’d met through Arthur—served them both right for reminding me of everything I wasn’t.

  Do you really think this will improve anything? jabbered a voice in my head.

  There are two kinds of improvement, answered another. The type that makes things better, and the type that puts us in control.

  My email chimed.

  Fuck, I needed to get a grip. I unclenched my fingers from the edge of the table and navigated over to my inbox with enforced calm.

  The message was from Pilar. She’d sent me access to a server folder instead of links or email attachments, and once I logged on I could see why. An impossible volume of data unfolded before me, a massive, overwhelming computational problem that sprawled to the edges of the earth. One I could lose myself in.

  I took a shuddering breath. Thank Christ.

  * * *

  WHEN ARTHUR knocked on my door that night, I had printed out and fitted together zoomed-in satellite images all across my floor, until one huge map of the greater Los Angeles area carpeted the space. My sparse furniture was pushed to one side, and I perched on the table, gazing down. My brain had calmed, momentarily, swallowed into submission by the breadth of the problem at hand.

  Pilar had not only gotten me the qualitative reports, she’d found gigs and gigs of testing data, actual numbers I could manipulate and adjust and use to answer the question of whether I’d be able to adapt the technology in reality. She’d also traced the location of where the prototypes had ended up after Arkacite Technologies had disintegrated—breaking in and lifting one would be the easy part, as long as the mathematics told me a smooth overlap of the devices’ influence would be possible in the first place.

  Thousands of inputs. A two-dimensional surface function that undulated above the differentiable manifold of Los Angeles, mapping and combining, the colors striating and then smoothing as I tweaked each point source. A delicate spiderweb over the city, each thread tugging at every other in a massive, continuous constraint satisfaction problem.

  “Russell? You there?” Arthur called.

  I reached down from the table and unlocked the deadbolt. “Come in.”

  He opened the door to step inside and stopped short, taking in my floor full of paper. “Hey. Whatcha doing?”

  “Differential geometry.”

  “Sorry I asked.” He sidestepped against the wall to avoid walking on any of the sheets. “We got another one.”

  My head snapped up. “Another what?” Relief at more to do collided with the dread that pooled in my gut. I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  Arthur had his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders sloping with fatigue. “Think it’s Pourdry again.”

  “Tell me it isn’t kids this time.”

  “Don’t know yet,” said Arthur. “You in?”

  “Of course I’m in. Just let me gear up.”

  Ten minutes later we were speeding down the freeway. I took the passenger seat of Arthur’s SUV again, making sure my spare magazines were all topped off.

  A set of headlights poked at my consciousness from one of the side mirrors, a driving pattern that wasn’t taking advantage of the traffic properly. I jerked.

  “What is it?” Arthur asked.

  “Are we being followed?”

  He slowed and changed lanes, as if about to take an exit. The car sped past.

  What the hell was wrong with me? At least that time it had been something quantifiable, but the driver had probably just been drunk or something. Going into an operation, I needed to be clearheaded or I’d get us both killed.

  I tried to slam the demons out of my head. I didn’t have time for them. “Give me the lowdown,” I said to Arthur instead. “What do you know?”

  “Not much. Just a location. Heard Pourdry’s trying to replace his shipment from last night.”

  His shipment of people. Teenagers. Children. Kids like the spirited Katrina, abducted and ground down and hollowed out because, in the eyes of these lowlifes, they were nothing.

  Arthur was clearly thinking along the same lines. “No one wants to admit we still got slavery going on in this country.”

  “The strong will always prey on the weak,” I said. It came out more severe than I meant to be. “That’s human nature.”

  “So—what? We gotta accept they have the power?”

  “No. We make them weak.”

  Arthur’s grunt didn’t quite sound like agreement.

  We pulled over a block out. Arthur’s location was a multi-arch bridge that spanned the river and freeway as well as a few city blocks, raising the city into three dimensions. Side streets ran parallel, ramping up onto the raised highway level or slanting down off it. The local roads below became a jungle of concrete in the darkness, a no-man’s-land of pillar and tunnel and shadow.

  We kept our footfalls quiet as we jogged forward and ducked under the darkness of the bridge. We both had handguns out—me my trusty Colt, Arthur a Glock .45. I’d ragged on him for carrying a Glock since I’d known him, but he continued to insist it had never given him a hiccup of trouble in the field.

  I also had an HK416 carbine looped around me on a sling. Best to be prepared.

  Arthur held up a hand.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Hear something.”

  He sidestepped farther into the shadows, his gun steady. I followed.

  The sound rose and fell, tickling the edges of my hearing. A jagged, bleeding sound. The sound of a kid crying.

  Ahead of me, Arthur moved steadily toward it.

  “Wait,” I said.

  He froze.

  Up and down. Up and down. Sob, breathe, sob.

  “Russell?” Arthur’s voice bowed with tension, tight as a guitar string.

  Sob, breathe, sob. The same frequencies, as clear as if it were graphed out on an oscilloscope. Periodic.

  “It’s looping,” I said.

  He didn’t try listening for it—he probably couldn’t have discerned it anyway; the cries weren’t distinctive enough from eac
h other for the loop to be obvious to anyone else. But Arthur trusted me. “A recording?”

  I half turned to cover our six. “Where did you get this intel?”

  “Info on crime lords, it’s not like I’m talking to folks with tons of vetting. Think it’s a trap?”

  “Well,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “Back the way we came?”

  I considered. If I were setting a trap here and I had an infinite number of goons at my disposal, the first thing I would do was close off escape.

  “We cut sideways,” I said. Not back to where they’d be closing the gap, not forward where they’d be expecting us.

  Arthur rotated on the spot and slid into following me as I took point. I headed deeper under the bridge, the alley we were on becoming a tunnel. The air reeked of stale sewage and human urine.

  “We keep going this way, we’ll hit the freeway,” Arthur murmured.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” I answered. Arthur thought the freeway wall would box us in. Hopefully the bad guys would, too, and wouldn’t bother trying to cut us off that way. If we could get to it before the trap sprung, they’d never know how we slipped their noose.

  “How’s your climbing?” I said.

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “I’ll give you a boost.”

  We angled into the darkness, toward the deceptively distant sounds of whizzing traffic, slipping from one edge of cover to the next. Arthur kept his vision and gun barrel sweeping in a wide arc behind us as he followed me, and I stayed alert for a whisper of movement, a glint of metal.…

  We almost made it.

  It’s hard to beat me in a gunfight if I know where you are. But if you’re smart, if you’re the type of person who shoots before revealing your position …

  A suppressed report echoed against the concrete at the same time Arthur went down like he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule.

  My Colt roared and smacked my hand, and somewhere out in the darkness there was one less goon.

  “Arthur!” I stayed covering him, not daring to take my eyes off our surroundings and look down. I swung up my carbine with my other hand and let loose a volley of suppression fire into the darkness while I scanned. There: a rustle, a flash of skin. I fired again, and this time I saw the body sprawl out of the shadows. “Arthur, get up!”

  Arthur was an ex-cop. I was pretty sure he’d been wearing a vest. And that he’d been hit where the vest was covering.

  Asshole. He better have been wearing a vest.

  I popped off some staggered suppression fire again, and two more unlucky would-be assassins gave away their positions by trying to fire back. They didn’t get anywhere close, and signed their own death warrants by trying. I yelled at Arthur again, and he finally answered by joining the fight, his Glock barking as he stumbled to his feet. His gun wavered in wide figure eights and he almost fell into me, but someone behind one of the bridge pylons screamed as one of Arthur’s bullets found its mark.

  “Back!” I suited action to words as I pushed us into a reverse stagger. Reaching any decent cover would take us toward our assailants, and the freeway wall was only a short open stretch behind us … but now we’d be easy targets for the seconds it took us to go over.

  And Arthur would be slower after taking the kinetic energy of a bullet. Shit.

  “Change of plans!” I called the words between bursts of gunfire as we reached the wall, backs against the barrier. “You’re giving me the boost first. Cover me!”

  I’d been counting down and knew he needed to reload. I let off a few more rounds while he slapped a new magazine in, then dropped the carbine to dangle from the sling, said, “Brace yourself!” and ran into a jump.

  One boot levered off the wall, rocketing me high enough to drive the other down on Arthur’s shoulder. He grunted and half buckled, but his gun didn’t drop, keeping up the cover fire. My free hand smacked against the unyielding roughness of the top of the wall, and my fingers clamped down through the pain and became a pivot. All of my momentum went angular to swing my feet in a quarter circle and let me flip onto my stomach as I hit and balanced. The six-inch thickness of the freeway barrier socked me in the sternum.

  Ow.

  I swiveled to sit up and let loose with both weapons again. My left hand was bleeding all over the carbine, making the trigger slick. “Grab on!” I yelled at Arthur, kicking my boot at him above his head.

  “Are you kidding me!” he yelled back, but he was already holstering his Glock. Arthur didn’t hesitate when under fire, even when I was telling him to climb me like a jungle gym and pitch himself into traffic.

  The wall might make us an easy target, but it also gave me a good vantage point. Even with a hundred-seventy-five-pound man using my leg as a ladder, I picked off another two goons I’d pinpointed by sound while climbing. Then I let go of the carbine and reached down to help haul Arthur over the top of the wall. He folded over it inelegantly, scrambling with his legs against the stone so he wouldn’t fall on his head on the other side. The traffic on the freeway was a roar beneath us, beckoning us into the vortex.

  A man straightening from the shadows in my peripheral vision snagged my senses. I shot him, but too late—at the same time I pulled the trigger, Arthur jerked and almost slid off the wall.

  I heaved at him before his weight could drag us back the way we’d come, and instead sent us both tumbling over the other side into the dark roar of headlights, a tangled sprawl of limbs. I dropped my Colt so I could grope with my right hand as we went down. The wall took off five layers of my palm and two fingernails as I dragged for a crack of purchase to push our tumble halfway upright. I controlled us enough so I hit first, the force compressions crushing my flesh with bruises but any breakable bones angled out of the way. Arthur’s upper body landed on top of me, and I clenched his jacket in a death grip to keep him from spilling off and into traffic.

  There was almost no shoulder here. Horns blared as cars screamed by, the slipstream of their passage a violent maelstrom.

  “Arthur!” I rolled us into the wall, away from traffic. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—“Arthur, how bad are you hit?”

  His eyelids fluttered. “’M okay—’m okay.”

  Relief sandbagged me so hard I almost choked. I scanned him—the seat of his pants was soaked with wet red that was almost black in the darkness, but not enough to mean an artery. Flesh wound. Thank Christ.

  “Get up. We have to move.” If I were Pourdry’s gang, I’d be racing toward a car to take around to the nearest on-ramp and run us down into so much bloody road jelly. How long would that take? I ran estimates, error bounds expanding in my head. Not long enough.

  I knew without looking where my Colt had gone down—gravity only pulled in the negative y direction. I scooped it up and got a shoulder under Arthur’s arm. “Come on. Up you get.”

  Between me and the wall, he managed to stand, but leaned all his weight on his left leg.

  Shit. With both of us ambulatory, it was no problem to time the cars and race us across. Now …

  A semi came barreling down in the right lane, its headlights blinding us. “Stay here,” I said, and started running parallel to the freeway. As the truck thundered by, I jumped.

  Smacking against the door of the cab felt like running face-first into a tornado. A sixty-mile-an-hour wind tried to tear me off and my bloody hands almost slipped. I found purchase where I could jack in a boot and establish an unstable equilibrium, balancing the vector diagram so I had space to move. I got one hand into the door handle and used the other to swing my carbine around into the glass of the passenger-side window.

  The truck swerved when the pane went, but by the time the trucker realized what had happened I had the door open and was falling inside, that same carbine pointed straight at his head.

  “Hazard lights and stop,” I said.

  “Yeah! Yeah! Okay!” His hands scrambled around to find his blinkers, and he slammed his foot down on the brake with an alacrity that p
leased me. He was an older guy, probably someone with a family and a lot to lose. Good.

  The truck’s brakes squealed. Velocity squared over twice the deceleration—the stopping distance would still bring us almost three hundred feet down the freeway. With a leg injury, Arthur would be too long catching up.

  “Stay stopped for one minute, then you can go,” I said to the trucker. “If you start moving before then, I swear on all that is holy, I will shoot you in the back of the head. Got it?”

  He nodded as fast as he’d slammed on the brake. “Got it. Got it.”

  “Don’t be a hero. One minute.” I half fell, half jumped out of the cab before the truck’s velocity had quite hit zero.

  Traffic in Los Angeles is blessedly predictable, even in the middle of the night. The semi had started to cause a jam as soon as it began to slow. Cars behind it hitched into a halting staccato as they tried to angle out into moving traffic, and the right lane quickly dragged to a crawl, the lane next to it clogging as drivers from behind the truck moved to cut in.

  I pounded back to Arthur. He’d started to limp after me, but he hadn’t gotten far. I made it back in less than ten seconds and skidded against the nearest vehicle, a nice big Ford pickup that was now rolling along at four miles per hour.

  I didn’t even have to break the window. The driver threw his hands up and braked, half veering out of his lane before he stopped. By the time I made it over to the driver’s side he was already tumbling out of it, trying to keep his hands absurdly high the whole time.

  A large African American guy in hospital scrubs, he babbled, “Take it! Take it, mama!” over and over again.

  I took it.

  Traffic was close to a standstill, but not quite, and people are pleasantly willing to get out of your way when you bulldoze toward them in an F-150 with no compunction about bashing them aside if they don’t move first. I shouldered our way across the slowing swamp of traffic before Arthur had even gotten the passenger door shut, and we popped out into the fast lane, where I rocketed up to freeway speed. Within seconds we had passed the semi, its lights still flashing, and left the traffic snarl I’d caused behind us.