Chapter 50– Czar
Chapter 50– Czar
All white walls and shiny stainless steel surfaces, the Interrogation Room looked like something out of a speculative sci-fi movie. Airy, quiet, lit with so many fluorescent tubes one couldn't see their own shadow, there was nobody there, just a chair and desk facing a wall of reflective glass bent on chronicling my every move as I moved across the space.
As more testimony to the utter emptiness, my footsteps echoed as I headed for my designated seat. But I'm no fool. I knew from the first time I walked in that I wasn't alone. They were watching me– the board. They had always liked to hide behind screens and guards, too scared to confront the demons they groomed in the facility face-to-face, which, if I'm being honest, was smart. Not that I was happy they were that sensible.
“Czar Blackbird… Welcome.”
"You must know why you're here by now.”
Speakers but no features; words, no identity. It's how Shadeau’s Shadow Board of Directors had been communicating with all the agents ever since I joined the organization and began to understand how things were run. Did I think the trio had an unnecessary god-complex thing going on? Most definitely. But I had other thoughts too, like how their days were numbered. I just needed their faces. I didn't care how long it took me. I would find them and get even.
To think then that my major annoyance was that they had blackmailed me into a life I didn't choose.
“You hate my guts as usual," I had answered the phantom voices. "That's why I was summoned. It's not all that new to be honest. You lot are beginning to get very predictable.”
"I don't think you fully comprehend how huge of an offense flouting direct orders is. The slight you were reported to have committed during your last mission is proof enough. Let it be known now that disrespect will not be tolerated."
"Well if your employee errs you should punish him. Life gets easier that way. Suspend me. Fire me.”
“You can't be rid of us so easily, boy. Even you know that.”
“Well then. Endure my excesses." Capische.
Silence had trailed my words long and heavy before the wall to the far right had slid open, revealing a door. About four men then walked in though it– armed, unsmiling, low-level soldiers.
"You should have gotten rid of the housekeeper, Czar," another voice came from the speakers as the dispensables made themselves comfortable by the mirrored wall in front of me. “You're a stubborn one, aren't you? Have you forgotten that you have a contract with us? Did it occur to you once when you made the decision to let her go that you work for us and we don't accept loose ends?”
The weary look that had come on my face had been almost automatic. “The mission, if I remember correctly, was to finish the target off and I did just that. While I might work for you, you're not the boss of me. You can't dictate my every move, certainly not my decision to let a harmless bystander go."
"Interesting… The ruthless killer has a sense of sympathy after all. Isn't it sweet that he let a defenseless, innocent woman go after she witnessed the assassination of the year?”
“I am not a killer,” I had snapped at once, unsure why the label had my hackles up in the first place. "You are the ones responsible for every assassination I have done for Shadeau and if you're referring to the blackmail you have over my head–"
The chuckle underneath the mocking tone was unmistakable. “Yes, yes, the murder of three prominent US senators–”
"They snatched something from me without right and that was why I got something else in return," I had shot back. “It was justice.”
“Was it?”
Those two words would haunt my waking hours for time to come because at once bright light had filled the room and as it began to expand, what the harsh illumination communicated all but destroyed me in seconds. Right before my eyes the mirror wall became a video screen and what began playing on it could have as well not been CCTV footage because for a while I couldn't even understand it. To my disoriented reasoning faculties it was just moving pictures and colour– pixels and signal.
When it all began to make sense it was already too late for me to hold myself back. I didn't even know there was a gun on the table until I had grabbed it and shot all four men in the room, breathing like I ran a mile to a backdrop of maniacal laughter reverberating from the loudspeakers.
But what had I really glimpsed? Yes it was the footage captured the night my parents were killed and I have seen that several times already so why was this one so different?
Only because it was the truth. My parents’ murderers weren't the hapless mercenaries that investigations led me to believe were sent by their political rivals. No, the four men standing to the side who prior to that moment I didn't realise were to be used as burnt offerings were the ones responsible.
In simple terms, Shadeau had ordered for my parents’ deaths, framed the most likely suspects for it and then stood back to watch me spiral.
Unable to come to terms with my deductions– what they meant for everything I had become; what I had made of myself– I kept rubbing my forehead for about ten seconds, swearing under my breath like that would somehow make everything make sense. “What the actual fuck? Are you kidding me?”
“No, Czar, the men you just shot are the ones who killed dear Mr and Mrs Blackbird. ‘We’ did.”
I don't think I ever lost my wits the way I did that evening. “No you didn't. You did not. Shit. Damn. Hell. Fuck!”
“You mentioned earlier that we don't control you. Think again, boy. WE wanted you here and that is why every single detail– from the murder of your parents down to your investigation and the clues you happened upon– was our grand design. In the same vein, positioning the men who really assassinated your parents just before the big reveal of the truth and the strategic placement of the gun right before we wanted you to strike is one of the many art forms we've mastered in making people do our bidding– Perfect Timing. While you might consider yourself a horror incomprehensible, we are always one step ahead. Never forget this. We are not to be trifled with, Czar. Find that woman and end her.”
Minutes later when I reappeared at the corridor and Rosiel saw the blood on my shirt her gaze had turned deeply contemplative and tender. "Czar, what happened? Are you injured? Honest to God, I thought they would merely let you go with a warning."
“Even better, they showed me that despite everything I own, I have nothing in the end.” Especially my sense of right and wrong, of justice.
"Czar–”
Without waiting to hear what else she had to say, I had left without a word.