The door opened again. Noam felt the gust of cold air at the back of his neck and reached for his collar, tugging it up to cover his nape. Dara swept into the room like a black storm cloud—and with an expression to match.
“Probably my fault,” Noam muttered to no one in particular.
As predicted, Dara headed straight across to the bar. He slapped something down on the counter between Noam and Holloway—a folded-up newspaper. Noam twisted round in his chair to look.
Front of page six: a half-page photo of Noam and Lehrer, in color, captionedChancellor Lehrer Makes Time to Mentor Level IV Protégé.
The worst part was Noam remembered exactly when this was taken: a week ago, on their way back from the grocery store. Lehrer had a bag in hand. Noam was ... god, Noam was even wearing one of Lehrer’s old vintage Rolling Stones shirts. They’d gone home afterward and baked lemon cake, laughing in the kitchen, Lehrer singing along to AC/DC on vinyl. It was sickeningly domestic. It was—
Holloway picked up the paper to take a closer look, but Noam was already looking for Dara, who was down at the far end of the bar sipping a club soda and chatting with Leo. He didn’t even glance in Noam’s direction.
“Let’s get started,” Claire announced, clapping her hands to get their attention.
Silence fell, punctuated by the clink of drinks glasses and the flick of Dara’s lighter as he held it up to a cigarette.
“So clearly we have a problem,” Claire said. “Don’t know if you’ve all seen the news, but it seems our immortal friend is even more immortal than we all were led to believe. Álvaro was right; suppressants won’t work on Lehrer.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, by the way,” Noam said bitterly. “If Lehrer had realized I dosed him, I’d be dead right now.”
“Sorry about that,” Claire said, although she didn’t sound all that sorry. “Name of the game. We didn’t know we could trust you. But now we need a plan B.”
Yeah. And they were going to spend the next thirty minutes dancing around the obvious, too, if no one stopped them.
“The vaccine,” Noam said. “I don’t see what other option we have. No single one of us is powerful enough to match Lehrer.”
Maybe Dara, maybe once. But that was a long time ago.
“A plan that relies on you finding said vaccine,” Priya interjected, her odd accent—some hybrid of Atlantian and Texan, perhaps unique to those who had grown up in the quarantined zone—as smooth as butter.
“My odds are better than most. Unless you have another idea?”
Noam let the question hang in the air, Priya and Claire trading glances—then Priya glanced toward Dara, one brow raised. Dara stabbed at his club soda with his straw.
“We have to,” Dara said. “The vaccine should work.” The wordsI thinktagged along on the tail of that sentence, unspoken but still heard. “But we can’t just inject him and kill him and hope for the best. You’ve seen how everyone’s reacted to the assassination attempt. The people adore him.”
“We need to fix public opinion,” Holloway confirmed. “It’s as you said last time, Dara. We have to undermine his entire administration. We can’t let him become a martyr like his brother.”
Dara nodded slowly. “And we can’t move too quickly either. Even if we were to release all the material I collected last year right now, it wouldn’t be enough. People will be confused. Ambivalent. And in ambivalence, people will always choose to maintain the status quo. It’s simple loss aversion—” Dara must have noticed the way they were all looking at him, flat-expressioned. “Tversky and Kahneman, 1991,” he added impatiently, like that was supposed to clarify anything.
“So we start leaking what we have now,” Claire said. “Noam gets us more. We leak that too. And then, when people are finally starting to realize what a shitty person Lehrer really is, we find a nice and public way to kill him.”
“He’s speaking on Independence Day,” Noam said suddenly, the realization dropping into his mind perfectly packaged. “At the catastrophe memorial, in March. They haven’t announced it yet, but he’ll be there. That’s an unsecured location—only Lehrer won’t have bodyguards. He’s too proud for that. It’ll be internationally televised.”
Priya set down her beer, a clink of glass on wood. “Perfect. Noam, making sure Lehrer is injected with the vaccine will be up to you. You’ll have to do it when he’s already onstage, in front of the cameras, or he’ll cancel. We’ll have snipers in place.”
Noam had the brief vision of the look on Lehrer’s face when he sank the needle into his neck. Lips parting with surprise, anger already rising up behind his eyes like a storm. And maybe there would be betrayal, too, just a hint of hurt.
Or maybe Noam was lying to himself again. Lehrer didn’t care enough about him for that. He didn’t care about anyone.
“Two months,” Dara interjected flatly. All gazes swung back to him. He put his cigarette out on the ashtray and arched a brow. “You’re saying we have to waittwo monthsto kill him.”
Noam frowned. “Dara, you said yourself—”
“It’s not that. But we’re planning on two months with you and him. Together. Wasn’t it just the other day that you estimated four weeks at most before Lehrer realized what you’re really doing?”
Claire had been watching Dara, but now her gaze swung around to fix on Noam instead. “What have you told Lehrer? Where does he think you are right now?”
Shit. Noam had hoped he’d get away with justnottelling the whole of Black Magnolia how thin the line he walked really was. He should have known they were smarter than that.
