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THE ADJUSTERS



Book VI

Hell Hath No Fury



61

A Warning For Daniel Malcolm



“So tell me, Mister Malcolm—Daniel—how are you adjusting?”

Daniel Malcolm gave Elizabeth Parkinson—Please, call me Betty—a long look, wondering how exactly to answer that question.

He could answer it at face value, given that he was speaking to his main HR contact at ADCorp, his employer: I’m doing okay, I guess. I mean, there’s a lot to learn, and I’m spending most of my time continuing my training and learning the ropes, but I’ve been on a couple of assignments already where we went and nabbed a bad guy and I guess I feel pretty good about it, even though I’ve still got a lot of questions about what we do but I’ve come to understand that it’s a bad idea to ask such questions out loud. I did have a few questions about the benefits package and about floating holidays, though.

Or he could perhaps try to be more frank about what he was feeling: Well, to be entirely honest, Betty, I’m not doing so good. In fact, one might argue with some validity that I’m sinking slowly but surely into a depression. And I don’t care. You’ve got to understand, and I don’t know how much that file you have on your desk tells you about these things, but I’m going through a pretty rough patch.

Maybe he should go into the actual details, just so that he could see her face change, see that arguably beautiful smile fade away slowly. Do you want to hear about my last year at Darnell, where I found out that a bunch of dicks from a frat were messing with girls’ heads to turn them into sex dolls? Do you want to hear about that asshole from said frat who snatched Jenn, my fiancée, and turned her into a fucking slut and sent her out into the world, desperate for cock? Do you want to hear how I got this job, with Agent Shawbank offering it to me after I’m pretty sure she got rid of the man that had given the mind-fuck tech to those frat boys, Thaddeus Cargyle, the one man that might have had the key to undoing what had been done to Jenn? Do you want to hear about how I met up with this guy Sam O’Neill who’s a private investigator and told me that he would look for Jenn in exchange for me accepting ADCorp’s job offer and spying on this company for him? Do you want to hear why I accepted—because he told me that Cargyle had worked for ADCorp, and I believed him, and nothing I’ve seen until now makes me doubt his word? Is that what you would like to hear, Betty?

He could feel himself getting worked up, even as he monologued inside his head, even as Betty kept on talking about setting up regular meet-ups with his supervising agent and about physical evaluations, and while he stamped on those bubbling emotions fiercely because despite his desires it would serve absolutely nothing to blow up at the poor woman, at some level Daniel felt glad to finally have a genuine emotional reaction. He had felt dead inside for the past several weeks, finding it more and more difficult to concentrate, and quietly despairing of things getting any better.

He had not heard from O’Neill since the private investigator had told him what he had discovered at the Craven-Wilford Institute for Mental Health, the hospital in New York State where he had finally tracked Jenn, where she had been last seen. According O’Neill, when they met several weeks ago now, Jenn had been taken from the Institute while she was in a medically-induced coma to treat her condition—condition?—by parties unknown, destination unknown.

They were back to square one, or at least, that was what it felt to Daniel.

So excuse me, Betty, if I don’t give a fuck which holidays I can swap for which.

“Agents in the fields are known to have difficulty at times—yours is a lonely job, and a difficult one.” She leaned back in her chair, her blond hair cut in a cute bob that made her seem even younger than she must have been. There was an innocence in her eyes that almost hurt Daniel. He was growing too cynical, he knew, and had no idea how to fight it—had no energy to fight it.

“Well, yeah, it’s tough, sometimes,” he said.

He had been on two assignments with Agent Shawbank, his senior partner. One in West Virginia tracking down a Special that targeted women at weddings, and another in the suburbs of Chicago. The West Virginia Special had been his first, and it had been a difficult one to track down, for he was clever. The one in Chicago was a quick in and out—the man was a raving lunatic by that point, and was spouting nonsense while foaming at the mouth—he had been grabbed by cops who thought he was a run-of-the-mill psychotic and put him in isolation. Thankfully, there had been no woman in the group dispatched by the force.

“You know how it is…” he said.

Specials were difficult to swallow, even after everything that Daniel had experienced at Darnell: men who had the power to rewrite women’s brains, almost at the physiological level. Had he not witnessed it himself, he would have never believed it. Even now, having witnessed it, he had difficulty believing it. It was too Dean Koontz for comfort.

Betty raised her hands, her smile widening. “I actually don’t know how it is—your division is over in the security-side of the fence, and I do not have clearance. But I see the numbers, I see the retention rates, I see the side effects of stress on our recruits. I realize that this was in your welcome packet, Daniel,” and Daniel noted the use of his first name, the way she leaned forward to get closer, make a connection.—Psychology 101, of course, but it was effective nevertheless, “but you do know that we have psychologists of staff that are highly trained to help if anything is worrying you.”

How much did she know? For a second, Daniel panicked, as if his entire soul had been laid bare for Betty Parkinson to read into. And then he wanted to laugh, at the thought of opening up to a company psychologist. His stepfather was a psychiatrist, which left him with a lingering distrust of psychologists in general.

“In any case,” Betty continued, interpreting his silence as consideration, “you will soon meet them—regular psych evaluations are required, and your first one is usually in the second half of your probation year, which in your case runs to the middle of June.” She had not needed to look up the date. Elizabeth Parkinson was good at her job.

Daniel nodded, not really listening, because he had caught a flash of something on Betty’s little finger. She tended to move her hands around as she talked, so he could not get a good look, and he did not want to stare.

“Of course, Miss—” he caught himself. “Betty.” He was rewarded by an even brighter smile from Betty.

And then Betty was talking again, but Daniel completely tuned her out, because he had seen what was on her finger, and it made his blood run cold—it was a small tattoo running around her little finger, like rings wreathed around each other.

He knew that tattoo, of course.

It was the same tattoo that Calypso had around her own little finger, in the same place. Easy to miss from afar, unavoidable once you knew it was there. Calypso, his friend and neighbor. And here was Betty, bearing the same tattoo that Calypso had.

Betty was talking about next steps in the probation process, and Daniel nodded and even responded at all the right places, but his mind was running ahead.

Without knowing where it came from, he saw the tattoo over Betty’s finger, and at the same time saw a charms bracelet, where the charms were the letters D, I, and K. The letters from the Delta Iota Kappa fraternity back at Darnell University. The fraternity that had programmed all of those girls, including his friends Serena, Kyra, and Cindy, and his fiancée Jenn. Each of those girls had sported that charms bracelet. According to Cindy—who alone had overcome her programming—the bracelet had helped anchor the programming.

“Do you have any questions?” Betty asked him, and Daniel came back to the small office in the HR division of ADCorp and paid attention to the pretty blonde in front of him, who seemed at ease and relaxed and far from turning into a sex-craving lunatic at the drop of a few well-chosen words.

“No. I think it’s all good.”

Betty’s gaze lingered before she pushed a stack of papers toward him. “Excellent. Well, if you do have questions, please, PLEASE do not feel like you can’t get in touch. You know where to find me, or anyone on our staff. We’re here to help.”

Daniel, still shaken by the realization that had hit him, took the papers and thanked Betty. She shrugged. “It’s what I do. If you could set up a meeting with a psychologist within the next two weeks, things should move along nicely.”

Psychologist?



*



Daniel walked back to the security section of the ADCorp complex, which housed the Investigation and Enforcement Division, unable to get the tattoo he had seen adorning Betty’s finger out of his mind.

He had pondered for a second, for a fleeting second, whether to try the control codes that affected Calypso. But then the sheer absurdity of it had prevailed—either the codes did not work, and then he had some explaining to do, or they did work, and then what? What was he supposed to do? Take advantage of the poor girl? He was already feeling bad enough Calypso.

He thought back to what had gone through his head while talking to Betty. It had been part of an internal stream of consciousness, and driven not a little by frustration, but truth often emerged under stress. Was he actually depressed? Or was it like the old quip about being crazy: if you thought you were then you probably were not?

Betty had mentioned something about a psychologist. The thought of sitting with a psychologist and telling them about why he thought he was depressed, about the mind control and everything else and working for an organization whose job seemed partly to capture renegade mind controllers who lived among the people, well, it was a hoot. A psychologist wouldn't think he was depressed. A psychologist would think he was crazy. And maybe they'd be right. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was fit to be institutionalized.

The thought of institutionalization made him think immediately of the Craven-Wilford Institute. Where Jenn had last been seen. From where she had disappeared without a trace, taken by a man of which they only had, of all things, a drawing!

A drawing that purported to show an older Asian man —it was difficult to determine an age—with a stony face down the sides of which ran two long ugly scars. Daniel had a picture of the drawing on his phone, and he looked at it once in a while to keep it fresh in his memory, despite it being unlikely that he would ever forget it.

He made it to the part of the complex housing Investigation and Enforcement Division, nodded to the security guards in lobby, and submitted to the retinal scan that admitted him inside the Division proper.

ADCorp was big on security. By all accounts, it was a corporation with broad interests, ranging from industrial chemistry to pharmacology, and was one of those corporations like ADM that had tendrils in all directions but rarely interacted directly with end customers. He had been told that the security was mostly due to governmental work and defense contracts that required various levels of security clearance, but he did not believe that was the whole story.

Because there were the Specials, and the fact that ADCorp was dealing with them went a long way to explain some of the secrecy. As he had been briefed when he started working at IE, Specials were not to be talked about. Communications across divisions were already kept to a minimum. Even within a division, there were clear levels of communication.

He took an elevator down to the basement levels, and headed to a large kitchen area serving the investigative part of the division, involved in tracking down Specials. There was a man sitting at one of the tables, pouring over a laptop, a deep frown on his face.

“Brisecoeur,” Daniel said by way of greeting. He went to the self-service fully-featured coffee machine, debating what to get this time. Somehow, a black coffee felt wrong given the multitude of options.

“Malcolm,” said the young man without looking up. “Bonjour.” His tone was distracted, and he was muttering to himself in French, sounding almost angry.

Armand Brisecoeur—a Belgian, he was always quick to point out with his slightly accented voice—worked with Shawbank and him. Teams in IE were made up of two agents and a technical support specialist. Brisecoeur was such a specialist.

Daniel nodded to a few other junior agents that were hanging out in the kitchen, exchanged a few pleasantries. They had a year or two over him, but looked older still.

He was again faced with the disorienting feeling that he did not belong there. Those junior agents, and every other agent he had met except possibly for Shawbank, were simply not like him. They were harsh, dismissive, entitled—they made him think of what the Delta Iota Kappa fraternity brothers might have become had they been a bit smarter and a bit more polished. They were cut from the same cloth.

He had read somewhere about the sort of people attracted to the cop life. Some of them were interested in doing good, of course. Maybe even the majority. But many were also attracted by the command that the uniform afforded, the authority, the power of life and death.

He was seeing the same thing among the agents. He recalled the words of Betty earlier, and he wondered how they had fared in their psychological evaluation. They were here, though, and the senior agents gave off the same vibes, even stronger at times. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he would be able to make it. Would it be so bad if he was let go? What happened to junior agents that did not make the cut? It would not do to have people walking around with knowledge of Specials.

Maybe they would get rid of him. He was less bothered by that thought than he might otherwise have been. In a say, he reflected, it might be the easiest way out of this mess. He sighed.

Everything had been so good until a year prior. Where had it all gone wrong? He knew the answer to that question, of course. Biff. But even before that, Serena and her quest for her friend Marjorie. And there seemed to be no way to recover, no way to make things even a little bit better.

Hopeless, it was all hopeless.

He turned to Brisecoeur, badly needing a distraction. The Belgian was still staring at his laptop with a frown.

“Everything all right?” Daniel asked. “Some juicy new assignment in the work?”

One of Brisecoeur's roles when there was no running operation was to analyze news feeds and other data sources trying to identify possible Specials—hopefully before they turned into burn-the-world psychotic megalomaniacs, a not uncommon side-effect of their ability to rewire women's minds. Brisecoeur, Daniel had gathered through the admittedly quiet grapevine, was one of the best.

Brisecoeur was still frowning, and tilted his head toward Daniel with hi eyes never leaving the laptop screen. “Mmm...?”

“Did you find us a new Special to hunt down?” Daniel clarified.

“What?” Brisecoeur looked up at him, a blank look in his eyes, as if only realizing that Daniel had been talking to him. “Oh. Non, non. Not a special. Worse. Much worse.”

Daniel looked at him, wondering what new monstrosity was about to be revealed.

“My sister. She's coming to visit in two weeks.”

“Oh. And that's bad?”

“You have no idea. Do you have any siblings?”

“A step-brother.” His mother had remarried after his father’s death.

“You get along?”

“We… tolerate each other is probably the diplomatic way to say it.” Sam was a handful, always had been. Daniel’s mother maintained that Sam had never really adjusted to his parents’ divorce. That felt right to Daniel. Sam who was a few years younger than Daniel, had calmed down somewhat upon graduating high school, but they still had a difficult relationship.

None of which he really wanted to talk about.

Brisecoeur did not seem to care. “Je comprend. Same with my sister. She's the oldest, and sometimes I think she still sees me as a baby. I can’t do anything right.”

Daniel nodded. He wondered if Sam saw him that way. Probably not.

“I mean, whenever she comes to town, she expects me to entertain her, take her around. And it's getting harder and harder.”

One of the agents sitting at a nearby table peeped him, a grin on his face. "You should take her to a strip club. The Night Stick has amateur night every Thursday. Your sister a looker?"

The other agent with him grinned. “She’s French, dude. Probably doesn't even shave!”

“Hey, don't knock it,” replied the first agent. “I hooked up with a French chick once on an assignment and man, she was so fucking perverted it’s crazy. And she had this fine pair of tits too, you wouldn't believe. All with a sweet innocent beautiful face like all European chicks.”

“First off,” added Brisecoeur, “she's Belgian, not french. And second, yes, she's good-looking, but should you fuck her, your package will freeze and break off.”

The agents laughed, and then left, slapping each other on the back, the tallest commenting that great, now he was in the mood to ogle strippers.

Daniel watched them go, and then watched Brisecoeur, who had not given the departing agents a second glance. “I gotta say, you do that well,” he told the Belgian.

“Do what well?”

“Dealing with agents.” Daniel remained noncommittal.

“Oh, you guys are easy. Pretty much cut of the same tissu. Self important. Like rock stars.” He raised his eyes for a second, to take in how Daniel was reacting. “You're different though. You and Shawbank both. But differently different.” He shrugged. “In any case, agents are much easier to deal with than my sister.”

“What does she like?”

“Culture. She likes culture.”

“Well, DC’s just next door, and it's choke-full of culture.”

“Ah! In her email she said specifically, and I quote: if I seen another Smithsonian something or other, I'm going to scream. I've heard her scream. I do not want that. Partly because screaming is the prelude to more painful things.”

“I see,” Daniel said. “Okay then. Well, a couple of weeks ago, a… friend of mine took me to this museum right here in Baltimore, the American Visionary Art Museum. It was good. She might enjoy it.”

“Mmm.” Brisecoeur tapped on his keyboard, peering into his laptop.

Daniel thought back to that day. Calypso had dropped by his place and had decided that he was too mopey for his own good. She cajoled him into getting dressed and taking her out, and they hit a restaurant and the museum and even did a bit of shopping. Daniel had ended up feeling better.

Calypso. He did not really understand their relationship. She was a nice girl, genuinely interesting, warm, friendly. They hung out often, more often than not to catch a movie late at night. She was a dancer, and her schedule was messed up, and she generally preferred hanging out than going out partying or clubbing.

“Okay,” the Belgian said, his eyes lighting up as he parsed the content of the museum website. “This might work. This might just work.”

He looked up at Daniel, “Thanks, hombre. I owe you a big one. Like, huge.” He made a gesture, as though describing a fish he had caught. Daniel could not help but grin in response.

“It’s nothing.”

Brisecoeur made a face. “You say that, but that’s because you haven’t met Francine.” And then Brisecoeur frowned and looked askance at Daniel, as if evaluating him. “Unless… say, are you seeing someone right now?”

“What?”

Brisecoeur shook his head. “No, forget it. I actually like you. I couldn’t do that to you. She’d swallow you whole and spit you the bones.”

“You know,” Daniel said, “I think this is my cue to go. I’m done for the day anyway, unless you have something for me.”

Brisecoeur shook his head, and returned to his laptop, looking happier than he had not fifteen minutes earlier. Daniel, who was indeed done for the day, tossed his empty coffee cup in the trash.

“En passant,” Brisecoeur said to Daniel as he left. “Heads up. I got a ping on a possible Freak earlier today. So get ready to maybe move quickly.”



*



The drive from the ADCorp complex in Northern Maryland to his apartment in Baltimore was problem-free, an advantage with going counter-traffic. He had the music blasting the whole time, old hard rock hits, drowning his thoughts.

It was music that his father had liked. His mother’s tastes veered toward the classical more. Her greatest achievement, she had once said, was to convince Daniel’s father to give classical music a try, and he had ended up enjoying Beethoven quite a bit—the hard rock of the seventeen hundreds, he had been known to say. But classic rock had been his go-to music.

Daniel did not think about his father often. He had died when Daniel was three, a lab accident at Columbia University. When he did think about him, it was mostly to wonder what it would be like to have him in his life—he was close to his mother, but she was a busy surgeon at a major hospital and was often difficult to connect with emotionally.

His apartment felt forlorn, as it always did. It was spacious, and almost completely empty. A couch, a coffee table, a flat screen television furnished the main room. In the bedroom, a bare bed. Walls were unadorned aside from a large poster of Jenn, a blown-up picture taken from the back in which she was looking over her shoulder, her wavy dark hair catching in the wind, the hint of a smile on her lips, looking like it was about to break out that full on grin he loved so much.

The apartment suited his mood, reflected it, fed it. The picture of Jenn on the wall tore at him every time, punishing him, and part of him welcomed that punishment. For she was where she was, wherever that was, because of him. Cindy disagreed—she maintained that Biff would have snatched up Jenn whatever Daniel did or did not do, that he had his eyes on her already.

Daniel was not convinced. And kept torturing himself.

The ascetic bareness of the apartment meant that he saw the plate on his coffee table immediately. Cookies. Peanut butter by the smell and look of them. A heaping pile. He shook his head despite himself, feeling a wave of gratitude. For the past eight months, ever since the beginning of the previous summer, he had been training in basic investigative practice, as well as self-defense and psychology. Police training, as Shawbank had told him once, but better. Daniel, who had been studying political science and had been itching to work at a nonprofit political action group, felt very much like a fish out of water. Yet, as Brisecoeur was quick to tell him, he was pretty good. That Shawbank had not killed him yet lent credence to that theory.

It did not take deep detecting skills to guess who the cookies came from. There was a folded piece of paper by the plate.

Figured you might need a pick-me-up. Call me. Cal.

Calypso.

He sighed, dropping to the couch. Calypso. Yet one more problem, one more difficulty, one more thing to worry about. After the initial rush of appreciation that she seemed to care about him—he did not even wonder how she had gotten access to his apartment—came the sense of guilt and responsibility.

Calypso had appeared in his life shortly after he moved to Baltimore, having just moved in herself. She was an actress and a dancer, and had found a place in a local theater company. She was bright, beautiful, friendly, impossibly easy to be with. She reminded him so much of Jenn that sometimes he caught himself forgetting who he actually was with, which never failed to make him feel ashamed and sad all over again. Almost like he was betraying Jenn.

Calypso had appeared in his life shortly after he started working for ADCorp, and he had slowly come to believe that had been no accident. Beyond the uncanny resemblance—both physical and psychological—to Jenn, as if to guarantee that Daniel would fall for her, there was the code sheet.

Daniel had received a cell phone by mail, shortly after Calypso had moved into the building. Said phone was used by a man—Daniel assumed—calling himself Paul who warned him that he would be tested by ADCorp, and to be ready to do things that he would not feel inclined to do naturally. Later that evening, at a party thrown by Calypso and attended by her theater troupe, he had intercepted a piece of paper that, as crazy as it sounded, included codes to—to put it bluntly—allow one to control her.

The more Daniel thought about the events at that party, the more he figured that he had been led to that sheet of paper. If Paul’s statements were to be believed, this was a test, to see what he would do, to make sure he would use Calypso given the opportunity. To what end was not clear. But given what he knew of his fellow IE Division agents, they would have jumped at the chance to fuck the pretty brunette with those codes. So the most likely possibility was that he was being tested as agent material.

But why would Calypso go along with that? Either she was being paid very well, or something had been done to her. Daniel had tested her variously, trying to catch her in a lie or some sort of reaction, but there was nothing. So something had indeed been done to her. Someone had messed up with her mind to make her respond to those codes like a computer responding to its programming. Daniel would would never have believed something like that was possible had it not been for his experience at Darnell University, and his encounter with Specials.

And everything pointed to ADCorp as responsible for it: Paul’s assertion that Danie was being tested, the tattoo on Calypso’s finger that he had also seen on Betty’s finger, tattoo that had the same shape as the sigil on the paper containing the codes that he had intercepted at that party, the statement by O’Neill that Thaddeus Cargyle had been a researcher for ADCorp, the fact that Eve Shawbank was looking for Cargyle back at Darnell.

Daniel had never given much thought to what made corporations evil, if such a thing even existed. After all, corporations were not abstract entities, but really emerged as the collective will of shareholders and executives and to a lesser extent employees. As near as Daniel could ascertain, the people he had met at ADCorp were okay. Some were nice, some were a bit rough around the edges—like the IE Division agents—but overall, everyone felt mostly normal.

Daniel did not know much about the executive board. He had seen a few of them at various company-wide announcements. Those usually were done by video-conferencing. He had met Control, the head of Investigation and Enforcement Division, an older gentleman that seemed perhaps overly serious.

Daniel had also met Patrick Dee, head of Advanced Research, a few times in HR, and while he seemed a bit young for an executive, he also felt quite normal. Daniel did suspect him of having an affair with pretty Betty, but what those two did with their free time was none of Daniel’s business.

The big boss, Adonai Davenham, the AD in ADCorp, Daniel had never met, never even seen. According to Brisecoeur, no one had seen him in the past four years in person. When he communicated, it was by phone or email, more rarely by video chat. There were rumors even that he was dead and that the corporation maintained the pretense of his continued existence. Other rumors went so far as to say that he had never existed, that ADCorp was run by a small group for people that maintained complete secrecy for reasons unknown. Daniel’s ears had perked up at that last one—O’Neill had told him to be on the lookout for a small group called Adjusters within the company, who he said were in charge. Could that last rumor be true? Could Davenham not exist and ADCorp be run by said Adjusters?

Daniel sighed. None of this gave him a clue how to deal with Calypso. Until now, aside from two occasions—the first time, and once on video chat with Cindy—he had not abused his opportunities with his pretty neighbor. He limited himself to licking her to orgasm when he invoked one of her codes, which did seem the least of all evils.

But then again, abuse was abuse.

But then again, there was Jenn, and O’Neill’s certainty that the only way to find and help her was to remain with ADCorp. And remaining with ADCorp seemed to mean remaining with Calypso.

There was no way to win. No wonder he felt so exhausted. And so alone.

Adding to his troubles was the USB drive sitting next to the plate of cookies—the drive on which were stored the videos that Biff had made with Jenn back at Darnell, videos that Biff had recorded to taunt and fuck with Daniel’s mind.

Daniel had never looked at them. He did not have the heart. But they kept calling to him because Jenn was in them—not static pictures on the wall or on his phone, but moving, talking, live images of Jenn.

Daniel lost track of how long he sat staring blankly ahead. There was no telling how long he would have remained staring blankly ahead had a recurrent soft purring sound not slowly worked its way into his brain.

He looked up, confused. It came from the bedroom. And it did not stop. Purr. Purr. Purr. Too uniform to be an animal.

In the bedroom, the sound was louder. It came from the floor by the head of the bed. There was no nightstand. The mattress sat directly on the floor.

The cell phone. The one that Paul used to call him. It was purring. A white light was blinking.

There it was. A text message. No name, number withheld. Only one person ever used that phone.

Paul. His mysterious informant.

The message—messages in fact—came in on a dedicated encryption communication app, the only one on the phone. They cascaded down the screen.

Interim reports coming in.

You haven’t been using your gift enough.

Why are you fucking up?

If you want to help your fiancee, you must do better.

If you want to survive, you must do better.

Be a man. Use her.

Daniel stared. That it was reflecting something he knew already did not help—it made things worse. An anger he had not realized had been boiling inside of him heated up further. Who he was angry with was not clear.

He responded, stabbing the screen with his fingers as though the haptic interface could translate his gestures into tone.

How do I know that any of this will help me find Jenn?

He wanted to add more, but could not think of how to verbalize what he was feeling. Disgusted, he tossed the phone on the bed, and paced.

A sequence of purrs announced the response.

There was a video attached to the message this time. It played when Daniel opened it, and he sat on the low bed, stunned.

The image was low qualify, from an odd angle in a room, from a camera that must have been mounted high up on the wall. It looked like an hospital room. There was a girl on a bed. Even given the poor image and the distance, Daniel would have recognized her anywhere.

Jenn.

She seemed to be sleeping. After a few seconds, someone entered the room, a man, who ended up standing at the foot of the bed, watching. A woman joined him, small, thin, and she stripped before climbing on the bed and making out with Jenn, who did not react, still out of it. Not sleeping. Comatose, maybe. Daniel’s heart clenched. The small woman got between Jenn’s legs and started pleasuring her, and the man with them watched. Eventually he left the frame and reemerged, and he pulled down his pants and the small woman started sucking him off, and it turned violent quickly, the man alternating between slapping the woman and fucking her throat with gusto. He then turned to Jenn, and climbed on the bed with her, flipped her around on her stomach and lifted her ass up before sliding his cock inside of her, a look of utter delight on his face. He took her like that for a while, and then Jenn started responding, and flipped herself around and started fucking him back, clinging to him, her legs wrapped around his waist, looking hungry, lusty, barely human.

Daniel went through every single emotion as he watched Jenn getting groped, as he watched her getting fucked. He groaned when he saw Jenn respond to the man, and started fucking him back. And then everything turned on its head. The man appeared to want to get away even as Jenn became more active, but she clung to him, and fucked him even harder. They fell off the bed and she kept on fucking him, even as he started slapping her and punching her and then people started rushing into the room as Jenn seized and clutched the side of her head and everything after that was chaos and confusion and Jenn writhing on the ground.

The video stopped.

Daniel was clutching the phone in a death grip, and stared blankly at the replay symbol blinking in the middle of the frozen image. He was stunned, shocked, drained.

The first time he had seen his fiancée in nearly a year, and it was this. An incomprehensible clip, showing she was alive—and still in the throes of whatever that fucker Biff did to her.

The phone purred.

Be a fucking man. Use her.

In a daze, he stood, made it into the living room. The plate of cookies was there, with the innocent yet innuendo-laden note. Next to it, the USB drive, containing even more clips starring Jenn, calling to him, taunting him, mocking him.

Daniel picked up his own cell phone, thumbed through his contacts to find Calypso’s number, his mind a blank, unable to think, unable to feel.



*



In the end, Daniel did not call Calypso.

He headed down two floors to her apartment. He was on automatic—after catching his first real look at Jenn since she disappeared from North Alexandria nine months earlier. He squashed the feelings that were threatening to rise to the surface: horror that she was still under the thrall of whatever Biff had fucking done to her, worry that she was in pain, helplessness that he was unable to do anything for her. It was as though there was a part of him inside that wanted to scream, but he could not let it, even though he knew that it was no good for him to hold it in.

He knocked at the door. Perhaps Calypso was not there. Perhaps he’d leave a note, slide it under her door. A note for a note. She would get a kick out of that, he knew. His feelings at imagining Calypso smiling in pleasure he squashed with the rest.

The bolt slid, the door opened.

“Hey you!” Calypso stood in the doorway. Pop music played in the background. She leaned on the door frame, her arms crossed right underneath her breasts.

Daniel guessed she had just come out of the shower. Her long hair was damp, creating small curls that never showed when it was dry. She wore a long tee shirt that covered shorts and bared her long legs. Socks on her feet. She looked cute and vulnerable and sexy as all hell, all in one package. The way Jenn could, just as easily.

“Hey Cal. Bad time?”

“For you? Never…” She smiled when she said it, and looked genuine. Daniel could not tell whether she was lying or not. Pushed the thought out of his mind. Despite himself, his ADCorp training kicked in, and he read her body language. She was relaxed, open to him, friendly. Her feet were pointing in his direction, her eyes were directed straight at him. Granted, she was crossing her arms, a typically protective gesture, but she was also using the position to subtly press her breasts upward, toward him, her nipples hard and poking through the thin material of her shirt.

“I wanted to thank you for the cookies. They were… surprisingly thoughtful.”

“It’s nothing, really. An old family recipe. My mom always made them to pick me up when I felt sad. And, well, you do look like you can use some picking up.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

She looked serious for a second, and extended a hand toward his face, running it lightly against his cheek. The worry in her eyes, again, looked genuine.

“Daniel—you okay?”

He did not answer. She had reached out with her left hand, and all he could see what the ring tattoo on her little finger, pale blue, and shining like a beacon. The tattoo that marked her as… something.

Daniel clenched his teeth, stomping down on emotions that were once again threatening to come up to the surface.

“You wanna come in?”

She said it with a mixture of innocence and seduction, that strange balance that she could pull off without any visible effort. Once again, Daniel wondered whether she was putting on a show, or whether she was genuine.

Or whether she’s been programmed to act that way.

That he had never considered the possibility stunned him. It was after all that fate that had befallen Jenn, after all—unlike the other girls that Delta Iota Kappa had programmed and that remained perfectly normal unless they were given their trigger sentence, Jenn had remained permanently under, at Biff’s beck and call.

Calypso had clearly taken Daniel’s silence for assent, for she led him inside. “You want something to drink?” she asked over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. Daniel watched her go, his eyes unable to resist dropping down to her ass, partly because it was a beautiful ass, and partly because she moved in a way that called attention to it, something she must have been doing on purpose, just one of the ingredients of the constant flirting that she and Daniel indulged in.

“No, it’s okay.”

He moved a heavy blanket out of the way and sat on the couch. Calypso liked to wrap herself up late at night while watching television. Unlike Jenn, she was not a reader.

Thinking of Jenn—fucking on that hospital bed, lost in whatever artificial lust Biff had instilled in her—made his heart ache all over again. Was she even still somewhere in there, he wondered, not for the first time? Biff had messed with her mind much more thoroughly than the others, as Cindy had pointed out. The only other one with that level of programming, according to the files from Thaddeus Cargyle that Cindy had deciphered, was Marjorie Duquesne, who had suffered a massive stroke—or something like that. Was that what was waiting for his fiancée? Was that what had happened to Jenn there at the end of the video?

He clamped down on his emotions once more—it was getting more difficult, required more and more concentration. He was sweating.

He jumped when Calypso returned to the room.

“I got these California cider drinks, and they’re pretty good. You should try one.” She startled when he startled, and sat on the couch next to him. “Jesus, Daniel—you’re scaring me! What’s wrong?”

The solicitude in her voice, the genuine sounding affection, broke through his emotional shell. He was angry—angry at Biff, at Cargyle, at the world. Angry at Cindy for escaping her programming while Jenn was Lord knew where doing Lord knew what—angry at O’Neill for landing him in this spot at ADCorp doing who knew what with people that wanted him to take advantage of others—angry at Calypso for being there, for sounding like she cared even though she was part of it.

He was being unfair to everyone. He knew it, and did not care. He seized upon that anger that was boiling inside of him.

Use her, Paul had said.

Surrendering to the anger that was desperate for release, he closed his eyes. He imagined those videos on that USB drive sitting on his coffee table, of Biff abusing Jenn in every way imaginable while laughing gleefully. He imagined all those Delta Iota Kappa fuckers having orgies upon orgies with blank-eyed girls doing things that they would never have done in their right mind, Jenn in the middle of them, urging them to fuck her faster, harder.

“Calypso,” he said, his voice trembling, “adjustment code C023.” He always felt ridiculous saying those words out loud, kept expecting her to start laughing madly at his gullibility. And part of him desperately craved her to do just that, for that would mean that the world still made sense.

He jumped when he felt her hand on his thigh.

“Hi sugar.” It was Calypso’s voice, but different, lower, seductive. If this was all a trick, if she was playing a part, she was a better actress than she ever was given credit for. But he knew it was no trick.

He opened his eyes, and looked at her. She was still next to him, her hand on his leg, her eyes holding all the secrets of the world.

Daniel remembered the sheet of paper with a list of codes that he had intercepted back at a party that Calypso had hosted for her theater troupe. Code C023 had a note prostitute next to it. He had not used that code yet.

Use her, Paul had said. Like he was nothing but a puppet himself, obeying orders. Paul had called him a knight before, the piece in chess that could move differently than all the other pieces. He felt anything but a knight right then.

“What’s your name, sugar?” Calypso asked in her seductive tone, her hand more insistent on his thigh.

“Daniel,” he said, looking at her square in the eye.

“Hello Daniel. My name’s Dolce.”

“Fancy name.”

“Means sweet in Italian. Cause I can be fancy. I can also be not fancy. Fact is, I can be anything you want, really. Is this your first time?”

“First time?”

“With an escort.”

“What if it is?”

Calypso—or Dolce—smiled a smile that held dirty promises. “Well then I have to coach you into proper etiquette.”

She squeezed his thigh once more, and settled back on the couch, facing him. Her legs were tucked underneath her, and were Daniel to look, he would see her shorts stretched between her legs.

“So what do you like?” she asked, twirling her hair around a finger. Her lips were wet, her eyes bright. When he did not answer, she clarified. “I can be sweet, I can be naughty. I can be fancy. But I can also be crass. I can be anything you want, can be anyone you want. You paid for it, and you’ll get your money worth.”

“But I didn’t pay for it.” He did not know why he had said that—aside from an irrational need to smack her out of her calm demeanor. She was too calm, too composed for his own whirlwind emotions. He wanted to stir things up. Part of him wanted to run away from it all, part of him wanted to kiss her. Part of him wanted to take her.

But she did not flinch, merely shrugged. A cool professional, knowing exactly what she was doing. “So someone else did? What do you care? You have me for the night, paid for in full, to satisfy your nastiest fantasies.”

Was she taunting him? Was she referring to the people that had hired her, if there were some? In the mood he was in, a boil of anger waiting to be lanced and explode, it was enough. He clenched his jaw, and had to resist the urge to move and do something he might later regret.

Calypso—or Dolce—missed nothing of that, and her smile turned naughty. “Why so angry? Did I touch a sore spot? Are you going to take it out on me? Are you going to punish me?” She made a face, at once innocent and irreverent. “Are you going to punish your little whore because she’s just that, a whore? Are you going to spank the naughty out of me?” She reached up to grasp her breasts through her tee shirt, hefting them and kneading them.

Daniel watched, still simmering—that Calypso had traded her persona for Dolce helped, as weird as it was, because she looked less like her friend and more like an anonymous pretty girl sexing it up. He did not even realize he had gotten hard already, and was getting harder as Calypso—Dolce—spread her legs, and arranged to press one foot into his crotch.

“What do you want, Daniel? What do you want your little whore to do? Want to slap me around some? Some guys like that, a lot. Makes them hot to beat up a girl before fucking her. Fucking her up with their fists before fucking her up with their cock. Real men, hard and tough and never taking no for an answer.”

Images of Biff, beaten, paralyzed, and burning to death in a tunnel underneath the Delta Iota Kappa fraternity house came to Daniel’s mind. Who’s the real man now, fucker?

He looked at Calypso—Dolce—who was looking back at him biting her lips, and kneading her breasts. “Strip,” he said, his jaw clenched.

She grinned and pulled off her tee shirt, revealing her two perfectly sized breasts tipped with hard nipples. “You like my tits?” she asked. She did not wait for his answer. “I’m saving up to get bigger ones. A whore should have big fat whore tits, that’s what guys tell me all the time. They want me to get big tits so that they can fuck them. And it makes them easier to slap around, too. Get them bouncing all over the place.”

Daniel watched her, caught between anger and repulsion, one feeding the other. There was Calypso, his neighbor that reminded him so much of Jenn, funny, sweet, and flirty Calypso, and then there was this, Dolce, foul-mouthed and unashamed, seeming to read his mind and press all the buttons that needed pushing to get a rise out of him.

She raised her ass off the couch and pulled her pajama shorts off, sliding them down her long dancer’s legs and tossing them his way. They were soft and warm.

She leaned back and spread her legs, her pussy with its thin landing strip opening up in all of its glory.

“What about my cunt, Daniel? You like my cunt?”

Daniel’s eyes lifted from her crotch to her face. She was grinning openly at him now. “You talk a lot, Dolce.” He emphasized her name, to cement the fact that she was not his neighbor now, but a stranger.

“If you want me to shut up, sugar, you should find a way to keep my mouth busy.”

He shifted on the couch, and Calypso—Dolce—spread her legs wider. One of her hands drifted down to her pussy and started caressing it. Her eyes never left his.

He showed her the pajama bottoms she had thrown a minute earlier. “I can gag you with these.” He slid near her, on his knees on the couch between her legs.

Calypso—Dolce—licked her lips, and leaned back on the couch, arching her back. “If you want, sugar. Most guys like to shut me up with a big fat cock down my throat. I think they like to see me choke on it, get all red, snort and fight for air. They get super hard.” Daniel was almost on top of her by that point. “You gonna punish your little whore with your cock, Daniel?”

He kissed her, mashing his lips against hers, and pressing her into the couch’s cushions. Her own lips parted, letting his tongue inside, and she moaned before pushing on his chest.

“Don’t you know that whores don’t kiss?”

“Aren’t whores supposed to do what they’re told?”

She did not respond with words, merely pulled his head down toward hers and kissed him this time, as hard as he had kissed her, and her tongue was the one pressing into his mouth, licking and wrestling with his. She wrapped her arms and legs around his body and rubbed against him, and Daniel went with the flow, able for a moment to simply stop thinking and feeling and merely surfed the sensations that his body conveyed.

He had felt her body before, but this time it was different—she was different. She was not Calypso, she was Dolce. She felt like a different person, sharing some characteristics with Calypso, but with her own thought processes, her own emotions. The psychological training he had been receiving at ADCorp had not gone to waste.

She was fumbling with his slacks, and before too long she had both of her hands down in his crotch, clutching and rubbing his cock, hard and sensitive. She moaned in his mouth, her body undulated underneath his, and when he lifted his head to breath, she pushed him back to the other end of the couch.

And then she plunged and took his cock in her mouth, and Daniel’s vision clouded. The adrenaline coursing through his veins intensified every sensation, and Calypso—Dolce—had a talented mouth. She sucked him hard, immediately settling on an aggressive rhythm and kept it up, bobbing her head up and down, slurping loudly all the while.

Daniel leaned back into the couch, surrendering. Calypso—Dolce—redoubled her energies, sucking him harder and deeper, her hair held back by a hand. Without breaking stride, she grabbed one of Daniel’s own hands and brought it to her breasts and pressed it there. He squeezed, and that only spurred her on.

He thought he would lose it when she started thrusting her face deep onto his cock, gagging herself, holding her head there before pulling back up slowly and then plunging once more. He could not help his hips rising up to meet her mouth, and she took it, because Dolce was a whore, and she did was her john wanted.

Daniel thought she would bring him to completion right then and there, in her mouth, while giving him the sloppiest blow job of his life, sloppier even than Cindy when she was in full-on hungry-for-dirty-sex mode. But no.

Calypso—Dolce—straightened up after a particularly loud gagging noise, and looked at him. Her face was red, her eyes teary, and thick slobber was running down the sides of her mouth which she scooped up with two fingers. “Wanna fuck me, sugar? Wanna punish my cunt with that fat cock of yours? I can take all you can dish out.” She spread her legs at that, but Daniel shook his head and made a sign.

“Turn around.”

Her smile reappeared. “You wanna fuck your whore from behind—nice! It’s the best position—you can go from cunt to ass to cunt whenever you please. Guys love to stick it in my ass that way—they love to hear me scream my throat raw.”

Before Daniel could say anything—but then again, what could he say?—she flipped around on the couch, one leg extended out to the ground, her chest pressed down on the cushion. Her ass, toned and tight and beautiful, was right there in front of him, inches from his hard cock that was wet and shiny from her oral exertions.

Daniel was not thinking straight any longer. The anger that had consumed him earlier had morphed into an almost animal hunger, and his actions were barely conscious when he grabbed Calypso—Dolce—by the hips and slipped his cock into her. She was wet and hot. She gasped as she felt him burrow his way deep inside her and not stop until he was all the way in. “Fuck yeah,” she moaned. Then she tilted her ass and growled, “Fuck your little whore.”

And fuck her he did. He pounded into her like a rutting animal, hammering his cock into her welcoming pussy, pressing her face against the couch cushions in a way that must have been uncomfortable but Calypso—Dolce—did not protest, quite the contrary: she urged him by lifting up her ass and letting out a stream of muffled groans.

Daniel knew at some intellectual level that he should stop and let her up, but he did no such thing. It was easier, so much easier to let go of all his pent-up frustration without looking at Calypso’s face, only staring at her backside, her legs.

Use her, Paul had said. To do that, he had to forget everything, and let his emotions run amok.

He was screaming and she was screaming when he finally came inside her, his fingers clutching her hips in a way that would leave marks well into the night, his cock deep inside her milking pussy, his hips pressed against her ass cheeks.

It was less a release than an unleashing of all the emotions that had been simmering and clamoring for attention, sublimated through first his anger then the raw lust that Calypso—Dolce—managed to worm out of him.

He unleashed his pain in a way that he could not control, could not stop.

Shivering, he collapsed on top of the girl who was fighting off the trailing edge of her own orgasm, slid off the couch and curled into a ball at her feet, unable to contain what he knew would turn to sobs if he did not get himself back under control.

Whatever had driven him earlier had evaporated, had gone the way of his cum, leaving him a husk. Jenn was gone, his best friend Radhu was gone, his other best friend Serena was gone, everyone he had loved—gone. And here he was, alone.

He did not realize he was crying until he felt Calypso’s hand on his face and her arms around him and her breasts against the side of his head.

“Sshh…” she said, caressing his hair, soothing him. “It’s all going to be all right.”

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry,” he choked.

“It’s okay, sugar. It’s okay. Dolce will make it all better, you’ll see.”

She was still in character, still deep in her prostitute persona. But Daniel by that point did not care. She was a warm comforting presence, and warmth and comfort were what he most needed right then.

Later that night, when Agent Eve Shawbank called him on his cell phone, he was feeling better. He had settled in with Calypso—who by then had returned to normal after he had stopped interacting with Dolce—to watch a movie, and she was sleeping, her head on his chest. They were underneath the heavy blanket; Daniel was emotionally drained.

“Malcolm,” came Shawbank’s sharp voice with its touch of Eastern European accent. “Get your bags. Brisecoeur confirms a new Special. BWI, two hours.”

“Okay… Huh, where are we off to?”

“Los Angeles.”