“What. The fuck. Have you done?”
“I need information. I need to know if you truly are a special kind of scumbag liar. I mean, I’ve seen the clues. You’re on the board, right? You post on there? You and Wendy have a little code going, maybe? Yeah. I’ve seen it. So while I am fucking astonished that you would put Sasha through the kind of pain most people don’t ever recover from, I am not entirely surprised that you really are that special kind of scumbag liar.”
He stays quiet. Which means he’s plotting something.
“Nothing to say to that?”
A loooong sigh from Nick Tate.
“So.” I sigh too. “Wendy has been very helpful in figuring out what the actual fuck is going on here. And here’s something that might surprise you, or perhaps make you a little sick—do you know who gave me her name?” Again, I laugh. Stop it, Merc. It’s just wrong at this point.
“I’m gonna ask one more time. Where is she and what have you done to her?”
“Sasha,” I whisper, ignoring his question. “Sasha gave me her name, Nick. Kinda karmic, right? I mean… you trick her into killing—who the fuck was that guy, anyway?”
“My brother.”
“Your—wait, wait, wait. Hold the fuck up. You have a twin brother as well as a twin sister? You guys were triplets? Oh, fuck. You Company people are so… gross.”
He pauses. Three whole seconds of pause from the legendary Nick Tate. Then he says, “You remember Vincent, right?”
“Vincent. What a pussy. I can’t believe he ran on the beach that night.”
“He didn’t run, he swam. Right to the fucking superyacht, in fact. Right into the hands of Santos himself. That’s the guy Sasha killed that day out in Kansas. Santos. The Saint. That’s what they called him down in the slums of San Pedro Sula. Vincent didn’t run away. Vincent got himself tangled up in a mess that hasn’t even ended yet.”
“What is your point? No one gives a single fuck about Vincent Fenici.”
“My point is that he was James’ twin, right? One of them was sent into the dark world of Company assassins, the other into the hands of the elite to be groomed for bigger and better things. You do realize that’s how this world works, right? I mean, it’s common knowledge in the Company, but you never were Company, were you, Merc?”
I scoff again. “What the hell is that? Are you trying to make me feel inferior because I don’t have the blood of murderous assholes going back a thousand years running through my veins the way you do? Are you for real right now?”
“No. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m explaining the ways of the world. You, as badass as you are, are no one in this world, Merc. And I do mean that literally and I do not mean it as an insult. I simply mean that you don’t know what you don’t know. Nothing you see around you is real. TV isn’t real. And as much as people think they understand that they are watching actors, and sets, and it’s all fake—they still don’t get it. It just doesn’t sink in that the whole world has been staged. It has a director, it has acting coaches, it has a script, and it has a little something called ‘central casting.’ I mean, come on. Almost no one on this planet has the resolve to bootstrap their way up in any kind of business—Hollywood, corporate America, global whatever… none of it is real. It’s a setup, Merc. The entire world is nothing but a greenscreen playing in the background.”
I kinda knew this. I mean, I’ve seen shit. I’m not Company. Not even a lowlife Company worker, let alone royalty the way Nick is. But I’ve been deep inside. I knew the whole world was fake. I knew the Company was pulling strings and that’s why I keep my family well away from everything whenever I can.
But it was a general sense of fake. Like… OK. That fucking Bieber kid? Is this a joke? Where the hell did he come from, am I right? Sell-out concerts, screaming tweens, magazine covers and a world tour? What the hell is happening? And look at that asshole now. Fucking mess is what he is. There’s a whole list of child stars like that.
But do I have to care about it?
I mean… not really. Whatever, right?
If the elites of this world want to fuck up their kids—well, I can’t save them all.
But I get the feeling that Nick is saying something deeper here. So when he continues to talk, I begin to listen.
“We’re part of central casting too, Merc. All of us inside the Company. We play our roles, and that’s about all there is to life. And at first glance you might think—well, Vincent didn’t have it so bad. He grew up in… well, I don’t really know where he grew up, but it was a nice place. Look at me, right? Harper and me, we grew up on that superyacht. Secluded, pampered, safe. So I imagine that’s how Vincent’s life went. So we all think that it was James who made the sacrifices. He was the one they trained to kill as a kid. He’s the one who got captured down in Honduras. He was the one who—”
“You don’t need to tell me this shit, Nick. I was fucking there, OK?”
“I get it. You’re loyal to him. And that’s fine. I love James. I do. I respect the fuck outta that man and he’s been taking care of my sister for almost two decades now. I owe him. But if you’ve never been the one sent into the world of the elites to perform for them, then you can’t even begin to understand what that life is like. I’m not looking for sympathy here—”
“Sure sounds like you are.”
“I’m not. I’m just saying. Everyone plays their part. I played mine and Santos played his. I was destined to lead, he was destined to die. But he didn’t suffer more than me, Merc. Because when they put him on that dark path the first thing they did was take away his humanity. By the end there, Santos just wanted to die. It was his last wish and Sasha granted it, that’s all that happened that day in Kansas. It was one man’s dying wish to sacrifice himself for something bigger.”
I picture that guy with all those scars and tattoos. I only saw the pics in the online news. Never met the guy in person. But I felt sorry for Nick Tate when I thought that was him. I imagined that his life was pretty shitty since he gave it up to save the rest of us that night in Santa Barbara. Up until this moment I had almost imagined Nick as some kind of martyr. Someone willing to go down on principle because he knew in the end it would save the people he loved. Now, all I feel is disgust and betrayal. “Whose idea was it, Nick? To make Sasha deliver the kill shot?”
He goes quiet.
“Aw, no. You’re not shuttin’ down now, partner. I’m just getting started. I want to know right the fuck now, whose idea was it to make Sasha kill you?”
He lets out a breath. “Mine. Santos didn’t know Sasha, remember? It was my idea. And it worked, didn’t it? She got out, she got married, she got kids—my kid, Merc. She got my kid. She got a real life and she got to leave all this dark shit behind. All because she did her job that day. She played her part that day.”
Did her job. Played her part. I let those words roll around in my head for a second or two. I even allow myself to picture ten or twenty different ways I might make Nick Tate pay for his professional expectations of a heartbroken girl who had already lost everything.