“Not really. Not yet, anyway.”
“You should care.”
“Why don’t you just plug me?” I pointed my finger and clucked my tongue.
“That isn’t the way we do things. Nobody enjoys just killing people, not if there’s another way.” That sounded funny, coming from a woman who had so coldly and quickly blown away the guy in the herringbone suit.
“Making other people kill people, that’s better, cleaner,” I said, just to keep up the conversation. “No doubt about it.”
She lifted her eyes to the horizon. Sun going down fast, rocks all around.
“If somebody’s going to shoot me, I’d rather you do it,” I said.
“You really haven’t a clue what’s happening, do you?”
“Well,” I said, and stared at the last of the sun, then at her, also luminous and beautiful, “you’ve rubbed me with something from your skin and body. Your oils and juices. They probably have special bacteria mixed in, from the skin cream in the bottle . . . a heavy-duty dose. You didn’t use soap.” Too bad I hadn’t assembled all these observations earlier. A freshly fucked man, etc. “They’re putting out their special peptides and such, keeping me happy, but . . . somehow I’m still protected against being made into a zombie. Maybe it’s the treatment I gave myself. Or the antibiotics. I really don’t know.”
“Integumycin is designed to stay in the body and not leak out through the skin,” Lissa said.
“Is that a fact?”
“So you are vulnerable, more than you know. But I won’t make you kill somebody else, if that’s any consolation,” she said. “Whom do you think I work for?”
“Nobody,” I said, lying with a smile. “I think you’re beautiful.”
“I belong, heart and soul, to Silk, and so does my trainer.”
“Not surprising,” I said.
“Why isn’t it surprising?”
I thought it over, trying to round up all my free-range thoughts. “I suppose they find it useful to track people doing research in, you know, longevity, and those in the forefront merit special attention. A wife, maybe, to keep tabs on them, report on progress, work them if need be.” I frowned. “But I’m not clear on one thing. How do they program you?”
“They don’t, not that way,” she said. “I’m an orphan. They found me in Budapest.” She pronounced it Booda-pesht.
“What about the parents you introduced to Rob and me?”
She shook her head.
“They’re Silk, too? Wow. Must be pretty widespread.”
“Bigger than you want to imagine,” she said.
The evening was getting on nicely. The air, easily a hundred degrees in the late afternoon, was now cooling into the low eighties. We were having a very nice chat.
The man in gray must have been sweltering in the Toyota, but he didn’t move.
“Could you take me back into our room and rub me some more?”
“You don’t need it,” she said.
“Why don’t the bacteria affect you the same way?”
“I carry cultures tailored to make Rob happy,” she said. “What he was doing, his research, blocked some of their effects, and after a while he got suspicious. He wouldn’t make love anymore. Then he left me.”
“You really are very, very attractive.”
“In a few more hours, you’ll want to be around me all the time, like a lover or a wife,” Lissa said.
“Puppy obsession,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I will let you die.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment.”
“Don’t think you’re James Bond and I’m going to fall in love with you, too.”
“I won’t think that, I promise. Not if it makes you unhappy.”
She got up and took my face in her hands. “You aren’t half the man your brother was. I won’t be sad when you die.”
“You had to be in love with Rob to do your job convincingly,” I said.
“It was something like love,” Lissa said.
“Maybe you inspired him,” I said.
“You each had half the secret, but you never put the two halves together,” she said. “You were stupid, quarreling brothers. It’s a nasty little secret, anyway, you know? You have no idea how nasty.”
