The Insides Read Online Free PDF Page B

guns?”
    She needs to close her eyes and concentrate a moment for this, but it’s easy enough: the guns appear to her wrapped in a radiant layer of information, spiky with facts, just waiting to be peeled. “One is a Beretta M9A1 9mm pistol,” she says. “The other is an M4A1 carbine rifle.”
    “What else can you tell me about them?” Unger asks, quietly.
    Cautiously, she closes her eyes again, looks back into the gun, follows the through-line of its travels. She gets glimpses and fragments of scenes. It is a bit like the process of remembering a dream in the morning, or pulling something up out of memory. Only not her memory: the memory of the thing itself.
    “They were stolen,” Maja says. “Stolen from a National Guard armory here in Massachusetts.”
    “Stolen by whom?” Unger says, leading her.
    Maja frowns, goes deeper. “A man,” she says. “A young man.”
    “Can you identify him?”
    She tries extracting the history of the man from the weapon, but it’s hard. Sometimes she can pull knowledge about a person she’s never met or seen out of an object that that person has handled, but the traces tend to quickly get obscure, and so it is here. She gets a glimpse of a head, shaved, the shape of a skull. A tattoo. Some number, some heavy black bars. Not much more. She opens her eyes, flicks her attention away from the weapons, back to Unger. If he knows the man, the information’s probably there, in his skull, just waiting to be read. She doesn’t really want to go there, but for the sake of the demonstration she looks, and, sure enough, she finds a whole history there, years of it, piled up in heaps, strata.
    “Your son,” she says, intuiting this just from the volume of the material alone.
    “Correct,” Unger says, his face threatening to beam. “Martin.”
    “You’ve mentioned him before,” Maja says. “You’re sending him with me. He’ll be serving as the agent of retrieval?”
    “Yes, that’s right,” Unger says. He looks at his watch with a degree of evident irritation. “He was supposed to be meeting us here this morning; I expect that he’ll be here soon.”
    “He’s in the National Guard?” Maja asks. She’s guessing now, rather than looking. She still wants to spend as little time in Unger’s head as possible.
    “No, no,” Unger says. “He was in the Marines for a time, but that was, oh, ten years ago now. He retains some contacts from those days—including some helpful ones in the Guard. However, Martin has realized—wisely, I think—that his talents are best deployed, shall we say, more flexibly than is usually encouraged within a traditional military structure. It’s outside of those structures that he can do actual good, that he can really do his utmost to address the concerns that face the civilized nations.”
    He pauses here, looks expectantly at her. Maja assumes that he’s waiting for her to take the bait, to ask something like
And those concerns are?
Or maybe he wants her to fill in the blank, to meet him halfway. Maybe it’s a kind of test. She’s not very interested in being tested in that way, though, and so she waits, her face blank.
    “I speak, of course, of degeneracy,” Unger says, right as the pause begins to grow uncomfortable. He looks down at his folded hands with a tinge of remorse, as though to even utter the word is somewhat shameful. “The rise, globally, of degeneracy. A tide which it is in the interest of all civilized peoples to stem.” He lifts his amphibian gaze to her face once again, and waits.
    Maja nods, to show she’s heard. She’s heard these sorts of ideas before, of course: those old nationalist ideologies never quite died out entirely; you can’t live in Europe without coming across them every now and then. You can’t read the news without eventually seeing some hint of them smoldering atthe periphery. Smoldering, and occasionally flaring up: she remembers Anders Behring Breivik, back at home, who first killed eight