by JC Hay
“It looks like late Russian black-market gear to me.” As though there was a difference—buying from a Russian had become synonymous with buying off the black market. Their technology, domestic and military, had a disturbing habit of walking off with anyone who had enough zeroes on their credit chip.
“It looks ugly to be certain, but it serves very well. Well enough that I can hear your heart speed up, your blood pressure increase. You are frustrated. You are thinking Grigol cannot help you.” He flopped into a wooden office chair from the previous century, which creaked ominously under the sudden assault. He pointed a vacuum tube at Na’im and grinned broadly. “You would be thinking incorrectly.”
Elise smiled and placed a hand on his shoulder. Na’im felt the heat of her close behind him, couldn’t miss her subtle scent, a spicy headiness that barely hid the delicious muskiness of sex. He squirmed and tried to shift his focus onto the moment at hand rather than torment himself with memories of the taste of her.
Grigol chuckled and tapped the tube against his ear-screen. “Better than a lie detector are my ears. Your feelings for our thorny flower are obvious to me.”
Elise coughed and quickly cut him off. “You said you could help. Keep talking. My concerns are how much, and how long?” She sounded more embarrassed than annoyed, and the realization prompted another stirring in Na’im’s chest.
“For my favorite customer? I can afford to be generous. What are you saying to two-thirty?” He set the tube on a desk covered with the bowels of a half-dozen electronic devices, and laced his fingers across his chest.
She clamped her hand on Na’im’s shoulder. “I’d say you had better be talking about time.”
“Alas, no. You are asking for very delicate work to be done, and Grigol’s first wife has come looking for her back payments. Two hundred thirty thousand. Euros, obviously.”
The sum was outrageous, of course. Na’im had braced himself for a ridiculous figure, and even still had to lift his jaw off the floor at the number the Georgian named. No matter what was in his head, it couldn’t be worth a tenth of the amount. It was beyond a princely ransom.
“Done. How long will it take?”
Grigol shrugged as though disappointed she didn’t haggle.
Na’im turned his head to fix Elise with a concerned glance, but she only smiled. “You’ll owe me.” Her voice carried a promise of exactly how he could repay the debt, and heat coursed through him. Before he could say anything, she put a hand on his head and turned him to face the hacker. “Later. This first.”
Grigol shrugged and started looking through the piles of electronics that constituted his decorating scheme. “Very primitive, as I said, but still they can be obstinate. Time is tricky to judge.”
“For what you’re being paid, I expect you to overcome such obstacles.” She moved a carefully balanced pile off a stool and folded herself onto it. Na’im couldn’t help being impressed by her grace, her efficiency of motion. She moved like a classically trained dancer.
“Certainly. There is the simple matter of payment, of course.” Grigol pulled out an older-model chipreader, which had in turn been grafted onto another device, like an obscene parasite. “It is secured, as you know.”
“Of course.” She fished out a credit chip similar to the one she’d used at Burj Khalifa—distinctly not implanted in her arm. “But I’m not about to take any chances.”
Chapter Seven
E
lise fought the urge to check her bodycomp for headlines and messages. She’d gone to great pains to find a black market application that prevented her computer from automatically connecting to nearby grids. Despite Grigol’s assurances that his uplink to the network couldn’t be traced, she didn’t know how many resources her former employers had dedicated to apprehending her and recovering their little prize.
The thought prompted her to glance over at Na’im. The Georgian had built some kind of phreaker—a high speed sound modulator—out of a pair of oscillators and an old speaker, and leaned close to Na’im to discuss something in a hushed voice. Na’im seemed to notice her eyes on him and turned to look at her over his shoulder. The smoldering desire in his gaze fired a matching heat in her belly and her nipples tightened beneath her shirt.
He smiled and blushed slightly.
Is he thinking the same thing? She resisted the urge to stand up, march across the room and clamp her mouth possessively over his.
Now is not the time. The last thing I want is Grigol offering to help. Both before and after she had split up with Ty, the Georgian had tried to waive his normal fees in favor of “an exchange of services,” but she’d refused to take him up on it.
A burst of sound exploded out of the speaker and she slammed her hands over her ears to cushion the attack. Elise glanced at Na’im and confirmed he was doing the same. Grigol bent over a keyboard and typed a few lines, then adjusted a slider. The noise dulled to a low warble. The Georgian nodded, grinning at his handiwork. “We are ready to begin the testing now.”
Elise looked at the chronometer flashing in the corner of her vision. “It’s about time.”
“Speed, accuracy or safety. You may be picking any two.” Grigol typed another handful of characters and the phreaker began firing strings of tones. Na’im sat directly in front of the speaker, focused on the sound as it washed over him. The Georgian stood and plugged a set of cables into his ports, then ran them over the table to a second machine. He made a few adjustments, and the first set of tones repeated.
Elise stood and tapped Grigol on the shoulder. “Call me silly, but I thought the password would be an actual word.”
“These systems are very old. Even the best of them still use traditional methods. Why reinvent the wheel when someone has already been doing the work for you? It recognizes notes, not sounds. Some particularly advanced ones mix in plosives and fricatives. Ps and Ss. But only the very best do that.”
As though Zaahir would have something other than the very best. She nodded. “Assume this one is top of the line. Possibly experimental.”
“This I have already done. Fortunately, this is like horseshoes. There are points for being close.” He tapped the machine wired into Na’im’s ports. “We are checking for response and modulating the next sound accordingly.”
The explanation made as much sense as any to her. Elise refused to admit she wasn’t entirely certain what the Georgian had tried to explain. She kept an eye on Na’im, mindful of any indication of pain on his part. The protective urge surprised her. With Ty it had always been a matter of convenient equals. Someone who could take care of himself—at least until he had decided the bounty on her head was worth more than their relationship. This was new, and altogether more frightening.
The tones shifted from dual-notes to triples and Grigol checked the readouts on the table next to his keyboard. She looked over his shoulder, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the gibberish that drifted past. Not that she didn’t have the technical chops, but Grigol kept his displays in a language he’d invented. He claimed it was the safest way to encrypt data, and she had to admit he might be right. She’d never seen enough of it to determine even its basic rules.
Na’im stiffened, then relaxed. Elise looked up to check on him, just in time to see his hands lunge for her. She dodged to the side, bringing her hand up casually to deflect him. “Let’s not get handsy, love toy. At least not right now.”
He evaded her sweep, stepped inside her block and used her arm as a fulcrum to throw her. She flew across the countertop, scattering the makeshift phreaker and a dozen other components in a spray of glass and plastics. She landed hard, pieces of electronics digging into her skin. Anger and confusion vied for her attention, as she tried to see what Na’im was doing.
He yanked the cables from his ports and vaulted the table with ease. The sinewy, lethal grace of his landing was a far cry from Na’im’s normal poise. The planes of his face were slack, completely without emotion. His eyes, on the other hand, were
focused on her and so dark as to be almost black. His stance implied the casually-restrained violence she’d seen in the most psychotic of janitors.
Elise shifted her weight back as he approached and then launched her heel into his knee.
His hand moved faster than she could track, swatting the side of her calf and sending her foot past its mark. No unmodded person could be that fast. Just like that, the pieces fell into place. Na’im stepped methodically forward and reached for her throat. Her fingers wrapped around a piece of steel housing and drilled him in the shoulder. Na’im teetered, off balance, and she scrambled out of his reach while she had the chance.
As soon as she was free, she screamed at Grigol. “You’ve triggered some kind of latent personality programming. They put a fucking cuckoo on board!”
There were lots of urban legends about cuckoos—named for the bird’s habit of hiding its eggs in other birds’ nests. Just like its namesake, when the program-egg hatched it had little concern for the host. Every covert she’d ever met had tales of a friend of a friend who’d seen or heard of them. Most of them were about secret assassins who did their jobs without ever knowing. She’d never actually met someone with firsthand experience, and had always written them off as barroom brags and ghost stories. She’d never heard of a doctor skilled enough to work even subtle changes on the mind and keep it undetected, let alone hide a complete suite of neural and skill-mastery upgrades.
Grigol had taken cover behind his desk, and if he’d heard her she had no idea. Na’im stretched and popped his neck, unperturbed, before starting toward her again. She glanced at the door. Her bolt bag lay over there, the pistol butt protruding uselessly from the side pocket. Not again, not another betrayal. Not another Ty. Even as she thought it, she knew this was different, and all the more horrifying. Na’im may have sold his body to Zaahir, but he’d never asked to be a puppet for cuckoo-programming.
She dove under a bench in the tight confines of Grigol’s workshop and headed the other direction. “Grigol! Replay the last dozen sounds and see if you can turn it off. With any luck he’s still in there.”
Na’im danced around the corner of the bench, casually picking up items and testing them in his hand as he walked toward her. He settled on a hardened iron pry bar, which thwacked meatily into his palm. It looked like a relic from the previous century, solidly made, and tipped with a sharpened edge. Of course he’d find something that could actually do some damage.
“Why the hell do you have a pry bar, Grigol?”
The Georgian’s voice echoed from under the desk. “Some cases are very hard to break open. Is handy to have.”
“Not at the moment!” She dodged to the side as the iron rod slammed through the space she’d been standing in a moment before. She thanked her amplified nervous system for keeping her out of the way of certain death. On the plus side, the mystery of who killed Zaahir seemed pretty open and shut.
He swung the pry bar again and she caught his wrist. He’d seemed strong before, but now the modifications to his body were in full swing. Her shoulder popped with the force of the blow, but she kept it from landing. “Na’im! It’s Elise! Stop! Halten Sie! Rukna! Desist!” She shouted in every language she knew, hoping the solution was something simple, but his face remained devoid of any recognition. She turned with his wrist and used his weight to leverage him against the bench.
He spun out of her grasp and brought the bar around in a wide, lethal arc.
She dodged in after it and drove her fist into his solar plexus before he could recover from its inertia.
He whuffed as the air fled his lungs.
She followed up with a punch into his armpit and the pry bar fell out of suddenly nerveless fingers.
He retaliated by sweeping her legs out from under her and sending her tumbling to the floor. Rather than worry with the bar, he stepped onto her sternum and leaned forward. Pain lanced through her. Her mind panicked as she felt her ribs compress. Alarms flashed across her vision, the display pointing out her pulse and blood pressure were spiking, in emotionless green text. Her chest ached and she beat on his calf with both fists, determined to make him pay as he crushed her. She saw his other foot lift, his full weight pressing down on her.
An electronic scream blasted through the room.
Na’im stumbled and fell to one knee.
Elise gasped in a deep breath before moving to put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay? Are you, you?”
In response, he wrapped his arms around her and began to sob.
Grigol’s coffee cup was hot against his shaking hands, but the heat only made Na’im grip it tighter. Elise ran her hand through his hair, petting him like a lover, as opposed to someone who a minute before had tried to kill her.
Someone who killed Jalila.
No one had mentioned that, but he knew it with final certainty. Nothing else made sense. There had been no unknown assassin, only him. Another round of shakes pulsed through his arms, sending scalding coffee spilling onto his fingers. The pain was intense, real, vital. It drew him out of his mental seclusion and he focused on Elise. “Who could hate her that much?”
Her hand froze low on his neck and she sighed. “A lot of people, sadly. She was the head of a multinational. She had more enemies than friends, you can be certain.”
“But assassination?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time. No matter what corporate law thinks, it’s certainly not going to be the last.” She sounded resigned, almost cynical about it.
It’s my last time, that’s certain. He refused to endanger Elise by staying. And as long as he could be turned into a killing machine against his will, he couldn’t be anything but a threat. His mind flashed over the terrible feeling—riding as passenger in his body, helpless to prevent or control the situation.
He took a sip of the viscous coffee and nearly choked on the thick texture. “Merciful Allah. Do you drink this or spread it on toast?”
The Georgian chuckled. “Is good for you. You will be missing electrolytes from your little adventure, nyet?” He pantomimed a quick, stiff jointed motion, like a marionette.
Na’im stood up. “I need to go.”
Elise looked at him, hurt plainly registered on her face. “What? Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m a murderer. I’m going to turn myself in, and hope for clemency.”
“You wouldn’t last ten minutes in jail.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not a complete pushover, you know.”
“I’m not worried about the other prisoners. Corporate Services would bail you out and have you on a dissecting table within the hour.” She moved to stand in front of him.
“At least then I won’t be able to hurt the people I care about.” The words tumbled out before he could stop them. He closed his eyes and swore under his breath.
She wrapped her arms around him. Her heat flowed into the core of him, driving out the chill that had settled in his heart since Grigol’s sonic device had somehow managed to switch off his subconscious personality. Her voice was soft against his ear. “I can take care of myself too. I think I can decide what’s a danger to me.”
Her breasts pressed against his crossed arms, two soft points of heat he couldn’t ignore. The vulnerability she showed left him dumbfounded. More importantly, it fueled a desire to be the sort of person who deserved the revelation. It resonated through him, turning his body into a tightly strung zither, looking for the right hands to bring forth music.
Even after he’d been modified, his emotions had never been so intense, or so constant. It made it simple to recognize his implanted feelings for Jalila as something false, lesser than the real thing. He buried his face in her hair. He could smell the slight citrus of her shampoo, laced through with a musky smell from her skin that left him dying to rip her clothes off. Later, though. Like she said, once we’re safe.
She turned her face up and pressed her lips to his. The kiss felt delicate as a promise, the e
ntirety of his awareness focused into the single point of contact. He wrapped his arms around her, sliding his palms over her ass to pull her closer. She broke the kiss and he stared at her, close enough to read the miniscule corporate logo circling the edge of her gray iris. He recognized the name, one of the highest end models straight from Beijing. Na’im took a deep breath. “So if you’re not letting me leave, what’s the next step?”
She squeezed him even tighter, then released him and stepped away. “That’s going to be tricky. I still like the idea of taking you off to Europe and getting lost for a while, but that’s going to require getting Corporate Services off our backs.” Na’im opened his mouth to say something and she cut him off. “No, I’m not going to let Grigol do any more poking about. Once was bad enough. There could be other booby traps in there that aren’t as friendly.”
“What about figuring out who put it in there in the first place? If we can tie them to it, we might have some leverage. If nothing else, the other corporates would be horrified at the thought of having a covert assassin in their households.” More likely, it would be a witch-hunt. He knew many of the corporate families would purge everyone that was suspect, rather than risk an unidentified threat.
“It’s possible, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. If they were clever enough to sneak it in there without Zaahir noticing, it’s unlikely they left any traces that could identify them.” She paced in a tight path, fingers drumming against her arm.
“What about finding another corporation to protect us? MAZ has been tooth and nail against Zaahir for eighteen months. They might be able to provide us a bit of safety in exchange for...” He indicated his temple with a halfhearted gesture. It was a fistful of straws, and he knew it had little chance even before Elise dismissed the idea with a shake of her head.
“We’d have to offer something more concrete than the promise of data in your head. They’ll want a lot in exchange for protection. Plus, for all we know it could have been them that set you up with the cuckoo.”
