“It’s no joke, Phil. I wish it was.”
He stares at her for a moment, glances at the tape recorder, and then he is hammering on the door. “Guard!…GUARD!”
“There’s no one out there to help you, Phil. This isn’t the county jail. You’re in an ant farm in the desert.”
He stops pounding. He turns around slowly, a new expression on his face.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry. I lied to you about Dixon: I probably would have killed him, but he was smart enough not to give me a reason. By the time he showed himself on the catwalk, the strike team was already on its way, and he sent them in with strict orders to take you alive—not because he’s a nice guy, you understand, but because even he didn’t dare break the deal Love made with me…Love said the Clowns had a way to trick your memory, make you think you’d come to me on your own, to pump me for intel, which would give me a chance to try to reach you. Dixon said it would never work, that you had no conscience left for me to reach, but I told Love I was sure I could pull it off…” She sighs. “But I was wrong about that, wasn’t I, Phil?”
She picks up the tape recorder and slams it down hard. The case splinters, revealing the flat disc of the Mandrill bomb inside. There’s a nervous pause as they both wait for the timer to finish counting down, but when it reaches zero, there’s no explosion, just a short buzz. A word appears in the digital readout:
SHIBBOLETH
Then the lead h flickers and goes out:
SHIBBOLETH
“Jane,” he says. “I can explain…”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you can,” she says. “But there’s not much to explain, is there? It was a simple test. You didn’t have to confess, or break down crying, or anything dramatic like that. All you had to do was walk out of this room without trying to kill me.”
“Jane…Jane, please.”
“I’m sorry, little brother. I tried. I gave you every chance I could. But this is my half of the deal…”
“Jane!”
“Bad monkey,” she says.
She pulls the trigger.
The NC gun makes no sound.
He convulses. One hand grabs the knob of the door behind him; the other flies up to his chest. A strangling noise issues from his throat; his face reddens and his eyes bulge. Her eyes widen, as she leans farther forward, taking it all in. His knees start to buckle.
And then, right at the point where he should fall dead of a heart attack, he catches himself. He stops gasping for breath. His legs straighten and his arms return to his sides.
She pulls the trigger again. Once again the NC gun is silent, but it’s a different kind of silence—the kind that signifies impotence. This time he doesn’t react to the shot. He stands tall, his face returning to its normal color. She switches the gun’s dial from MI to CI, aims straight at his head, and tries once more.
Nothing. He doesn’t even blink.
She is not pleased with this outcome.
“Phil,” she says.
“Jane,” he replies.
“You’re not the ant in this ant farm, are you?”
“No.”
“I am.”
“Yes.”
“Well, fuck,” she says, and tosses the useless gun on the table.
There’s a knock at the door. Phil steps aside, and Dixon enters the room. She greets him with a sour look.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
“That you are a deep-cover agent, working for the Troop? From the beginning,” Dixon says. He gestures to Phil. “We were warned about you.”
“Then why recruit me?”
“As an experiment. We’d been aware for some time that the Troop was attempting to infiltrate the organization. We’d enacted countermeasures, but were uncertain how effective they were. Recruiting you offered us an opportunity to test them.”
“So the idea was to see how long it would take to catch me if you didn’t already know?”
“Yes.”