“It was a lot harder than you thought, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Dixon says. “Of course I expected you to be a good actress, well practiced in passing yourself off as a charming misfit rather than the monster that you really are, but your ability to fool shibboleth devices came as a shock. Your emotional control was remarkable, especially in someone who seemed so impulsive. For a while I almost despaired of catching you out.”
“So what finally tipped it?” She glances at Phil. “Him?”
Dixon nods. “Even the most self-controlled person is subject to temptation. You were able to conceal your enthusiasm for more mundane acts of evil, but I thought your composure might crack if you were presented with a chance to commit a truly extraordinary sin.”
“So you sent me to hunt down my own brother.”
“To kill him, on the pretense of saving him.”
“How’d you know I’d go for it, though? I mean, if he’s really Troop, then we’re technically on the same side.”
“Technically,” Dixon says. “But it is true, isn’t it, that your brother’s abduction by the Troop was no coincidence?”
“Of course it wasn’t a coincidence,” she says. “He was my ticket in. They wanted a sacrifice to prove that I was serious. But they didn’t tell me they were going to adopt him.”
“I assumed as much. I thought the discovery that your brother was not only alive, but occupying a position of importance in an organization to which you were little more than a peon, would undermine whatever loyalty you had.”
“So this whole thing…” She waves a hand at the room. “This…play…It was all so you could read my heart the moment I pulled the trigger?”
“Yes,” Dixon says. “And the results, I’m happy to report, are conclusive. You’re evil.”
“Yes I am,” she says, unable to resist a smile. “But you know, you didn’t have to go to so much trouble. You could have just asked my mother.”
“Perhaps I would have, if she were still alive.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame about that. You know they never found the truck that hit her?” She sees Phil bristle and her smile broadens. “So what happens now? You turn me? Make me a double agent?”
Dixon shakes his head. “You’re a bad monkey. Now that that’s out in the open, the organization has no further use for you.”
“Right.” She nods, then shrugs, accepting the inevitable. “Oh well, I had a nice run. Did some good damage along the way.”
“Some,” Dixon agrees. “But less than you believe…The beginning was real,” he explains. “But after the Arlo Dexter mission, Cost-Benefits became concerned that it was too dangerous to leave you running around loose, even under close surveillance. True began pressuring me to kill you and be done with it. Ultimately I convinced him to accept an alternative. We gave you to the Scary Clowns. Everything that has happened to you since you met Robert Wise has been simulated.”
“Simulated,” she says. “You mean the Ozymandias facility…The diner…Vegas…?”
“Dreamscapes and ant farms, all of it.”
“No way! That…They can’t do that!”
“Love will be pleased his illusions were so effective. It turns out I owe him an apology. When I first saw the script his people had prepared, there were a number of plot twists that I was sure would give the game away. But the Clowns’ understanding of human gullibility is greater than mine.”
She thinks about it. “X-drugs don’t exist?”
“Drugs that allow you to stop time and fly around like a martial-arts superhero? No, they don’t exist.”
“Well, that’s embarrassing…So if the scene at the diner never happened, that means—”
“True and Wise are both still alive,” he says. “Oh, and Love didn’t have a heart attack.”
“What about John Doyle?”
“Bad Monkeys killed him twenty years ago.”
“And the bad Jane?”