When I’d landed on my ass, I’d dropped the knife. I tried to pick it up, but she got there first and toed it out of my reach.
“They did recruit me,” I said. “Maybe it took twenty years, but—”
“Yeah, and how’s that been working out? Word from our spies is, not great. Your mission failure rate is kind of an embarrassment. And why is that?”
I made another try for the knife. She kicked me in the face.
“What’s the problem, Jane? Are you just a titanic fuckup? Or could it be that your heart’s not really in it?”
As she hauled back to kick me again I sprang up and locked my hands around her throat. I felt her try to pull away and thought: Got you now, you bitch! But then her own arms came up, breaking my grip, and she spun me around and slammed me into the wall again, eye-to-eye with John Doyle.
“Yeah,” she said. “I really think that’s it, your heart’s just not in it. And I think you’ll feel a whole lot better once you admit it…Say it, Jane.”
“Fuck you!”
“Say it…” She pressed up against me, belly to back, like a full-body hug from behind, and then—the intimacy of it was hideous—our clothes, our skin, just dissolved, and we started to merge…
“Say it,” she commanded, her voice inside and outside now.
(I’m evil.)
“What’s that? I didn’t catch that, Jane. Say it again. Say it loud.”
“I’m—” I said, and then fought it, pushing back until the pressure in my skull was just too great to resist: “I’m evil!”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
She pulled back, withdrew, and I collapsed to the floor.
“First time’s always the hardest…” She squatted beside me, hands balanced casually on her knees. “So listen up, Jane, I’m going to tell you what your options are. Option one, you can deny what you just admitted. Go back to Vegas, try and square things with Love—or just run like hell, which amounts to the same thing, except he’ll be even less likely to believe you when he catches you. Option two, you can think it over some more. No one knows about this room but me—not even Phil—so you’ll be safe here, long as you like. But the lights stay on.
“And then there’s option three. You can stop hiding from yourself. Embrace what you really are, what you’ve always been. Join the Troop, and start making the kind of difference in the world you were meant to make. Now”—she leaned forward, lowered her voice—“I know what option you’re going to pick, because I know which one you want to pick. But I also understand you don’t want it to look too easy, don’t want to seem like you’re caving just because I kicked your ass. So we’re going to pretend you’re going for option two. You stay in here, ‘think it over’ as long as you need to, to save face—only not too long, OK, because we’ve got stuff to do. I’ll be waiting for you outside when you’re ready…”
When I dragged myself back into the den twenty minutes later, a black case was sitting on the bar. It was smaller than the case the Troop had given to Arlo Dexter, but the style was identical.
“You know one of the great things about evil?” the bad Jane said. “You can’t fake it. I mean, think about it, there isn’t a good deed you can name that an evil person couldn’t do, and still be evil afterwards. But it doesn’t work the other way around. You pass our shibboleth test, and there’s no question that you’re one of us.”
I popped the latches on the case, lifted the lid. “You expect me to use this?”
“‘Expect.’ When you say it like that, it makes it sound like there’s room for doubt. I have faith in you, Jane.”
“Who do you want me to kill?”
“Just some people. Nobody important. It’s part of an op you’ll be doing for us. For Phil, actually. He’s throwing a party next week, and he wants a Clown for the entertainment.”
“You mean Love? You want me to kill Robert Love?”