The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  “What? You never said anything!”

  Evie said, “That’s because we’re polite.”

  Hay snorted. “Since when?”

  Evie was already looking at Bianca. “And I’m glad to take credit for this meeting with Cymba International. In fact, if we get the contract I want a bonus.”

  “In your dreams,” Bianca said. “I could have gotten the meeting on my own. And I wouldn’t have to play dodge-the-date with Les Harper.”

  “You play dodge-the-date with everybody,” Evie retorted.

  “You want me to go with you, run interference?” Hay asked Bianca. If she feared that a male client might get too friendly to be dealt with politely, she would often take Hay with her to their meeting. Just the fact that she had brought another male along seemed to discourage most of them from getting too touchy-feely.

  Bianca shook her head. “Doc’s going with me. He’s the best equipped to explain all the technical aspects of what we can do for them. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be overseeing security for the Savannah Food and Wine Festival today?”

  “Yeah. I was just on my way out the door.” He bit into his muffin. “As soon as I finish this.”

  “Great.” Bianca looked at Evie. “If Monica Prickett with Prickett Construction calls, set up an appointment for me to meet with them sometime early next week, would you please?”

  Evie nodded, and sent a significant glance toward the clock on the wall. “It takes twenty minutes to get to Cymba’s offices in traffic.”

  Bianca didn’t even bother to sigh. Bottom line, given that her bank accounts were sadly depleted thanks to her not-father’s conscripting of her money to help fund the failed job in Bahrain, Guardian Consulting needed the payday Cymba International could potentially provide. To say nothing of the prestige of landing a major new client.

  Assuming that Guardian Consulting would continue to exist.

  If she was being targeted, if she was being hunted, her best bet might be to shut down the company, put the condo on the market and go.

  As in, run for her life.

  The thought was unutterably depressing.

  So don’t think about it. For now, just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Bianca said, “I’m on my way. Let me grab Doc.”

  Evie and Hay went about their business as Bianca knocked on Doc’s closed door.

  “You ready to go?” she asked when she opened the door in response to his muffled grunt, which she took as a come in.

  Doc was sitting behind his desk, scowling at his computer. At five-ten and somewhere north of three hundred pounds, he dwarfed the small, ergonomic chair he insisted on using despite all her offers to get him another one more suited to his size and the restless movements he made when he was working, the combination of which she was convinced were going to pitch him onto the floor at any given moment. She registered that, per instructions, he was wearing a white dress shirt and subdued tie, and that his shoulder-length mane of frizzy black curls was pulled back. A closer glance at his gray-and-black-striped tie revealed that it was dotted with tiny, bright green rabbits, and his pulled-back hair was twisted into a man-bun at the back of his head. Green bunnies and man-buns weren’t quite the norm in Savannah business circles, but Doc was from the Bronx, and there was no making him over into something he wasn’t, like, say, a Savannah businessman. Attempting to do so would be like sticking a fancy tail on a pigeon and trying to convince onlookers that what they were seeing was a peacock.

  Doc looked up at her—she got the impression that he had to make an effort to tear his gaze away from whatever was on the screen in front of him—and she saw that his pale, chubby-cheeked face was set in uncharacteristically grim lines.

  She repeated her question, he nodded in reply, and then said, “Uh, boss, you wanna come over here a minute and take a look at this?”

  Bianca felt her stomach drop. She knew that tone.

  It meant that whatever he was getting ready to show her, she wasn’t going to like.

  She braced for her already very bad day to take a sharp turn for the worse, and stepped inside his office.

  8

  “What is it?” Bianca asked.

  For a few minutes there, while she’d joked around with Evie and Hay, she had, Bianca realized, felt like herself again, like the person she’d been before she’d gotten kidnapped and transported to that damned black site in Austria and discovered that everything she thought she knew about her life was a lie. In the short walk from the door she closed behind her to where she stopped, standing behind Doc’s chair, she felt the warmth, the fun, the sense of belonging and friendship she’d been experiencing dissipate like mist in the sun, to be replaced by the now all-too-familiar sensation of having an iron fist gripping her by the throat. She hated the feeling, hated what caused it. If she could have changed things so that she didn’t know what she was, or could have willed the whole thing away, she would have done it. With every particle of psychic mojo she possessed, she wished for her life to go back to normal. For her to go back to normal.

  I didn’t ask for any of this.

  Too bad, so sad. Suck it up, buttercup.

  “See that?” Doc tapped his computer screen with a stubby forefinger.

  He didn’t need to. Bianca was already looking at what was on the screen. She felt like the breath had just been knocked out of her.

  It was a picture, a photograph from a newspaper. She’d seen it before. It had made her dizzy and sick then.

  She refused to let it make her dizzy and sick now.

  Bianca looked at the image of her mother—her gestational mother—and slammed the door on the tsunami of feelings that rushed her.

  Keep emotion out of it: that was one of the rules.

  The pretty, petite young woman in the picture had long black hair that was being ruffled by the wind. She was sitting alone at a picnic table biting into an enormous sandwich beneath a banner announcing The World’s Biggest Fish Fry. The town was Port Washington, Wisconsin, and Bianca knew now that the woman’s real name was Anissa Jones.

  In the caption beneath the photo, she was identified by the newspaper as Sarah McAlister.

  The accompanying article reported her murder, supposedly at the hands of her husband, Sean, who had supposedly also killed their daughter, Elizabeth, before committing suicide.

  The only true thing in that article was that the woman had been murdered.

  She, Bianca, had been the daughter, Elizabeth McAlister: Beth.

  Her not-father, Mason, had been Sean McAlister.

  One of many fake identities that he’d assumed over the course of his life.

  It was all a long time ago, she’d been four years old, and she had only fuzzy memories of any of it.

  Of her mother.

  She was not, not, not going to get upset.

  “Back when we first found this picture, I put an alert on the names Sean, Sarah and Elizabeth McAlister,” Doc said. “So I’d get a notification if any kind of search was run on any of the three of them. This morning I got a notification. Somebody’s looking for Elizabeth McAlister, and they downloaded this photo.”

  Oh, God. Her heart lurched. The timing was too pat. The internet search for Beth McAlister—for her—had to be connected to Groton’s death.

  It hit Bianca with all the force of a baseball bat to the head: the only reason she hadn’t been gunned down like Groton was because they hadn’t found her yet.

  There was now no doubt about it: they were looking.

  The knowledge chilled her to the bone.

  “Boss?” Doc twisted around to glance up at her. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” Bianca didn’t pretend that the news didn’t bother her. Her grip on the back of Doc’s chair had her nails digging crescents into the black aerated foam of the seat back, and she had a feeling t
hat her face was a study in oh, shit.

  Didn’t matter. Doc knew the truth about her. Not all of it, but some of it. More than almost anyone else. He did not know that she was the genetically enhanced product of what was basically a DARPA science experiment. He likewise didn’t know that she was not the daughter of Richard St. Ives/multiple other identities/Mason Thayer. He did know about that part of her life that had been spent as the daughter of a world-class thief. He knew that she’d robbed people, institutions, etcetera, for a large percentage of her living. He knew about Elizabeth and Sarah and Sean McAlister, and that she had once been Beth McAlister. He knew that the man he thought was her father had once been, among other identities, Sean McAlister, Richard St. Ives and Mason Thayer, his apparent true name, under which he had worked as an assassin for the CIA. What Doc might have inferred from all of that, she couldn’t really say.

  What she knew was that she trusted Doc, and needed him. Without his help she would now be fighting blind in a cyberworld that did its hunting through search engines and data mining programs and algorithms and a whole host of other things she didn’t even want to know existed.

  “Anything on the Nomad Project?” she asked. Since her return from Austria, she’d had Doc rooting around in the back alleys of the Department of Defense computer systems for any information he could glean on the program that had created her. So far, he hadn’t come across so much as a mention of it.

  “Nada,” he said, confirming. “You ever gonna tell me what that’s about?”

  “One of these days,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t. “Maybe.”

  Doc didn’t press. Secrets he understood. “If it makes you feel any better, as soon as I got this, I searched for links between the McAlister identities and Bianca St. Ives. I couldn’t find any. And if I couldn’t find any, nobody else can either, you know what I mean?”

  Despite everything, his faith in himself almost made her smile. As far as Doc was concerned, he was one of the best computer hackers on the planet. And from everything she’d seen, he was right.

  “Thank God we’re on the same side,” she said, and meant it.

  “Go team,” he agreed.

  “If they got to this picture, they know that Mason Thayer was once Sean McAlister,” she said, feeling her heart clutch again as she walked herself through a situation that was devolving into wheels within wheels within wheels. The enemies that she knew of who’d known of her Beth McAlister identity—that would be Groton and Kemp—were now dead. (At least, she was 99.9 percent sure Groton was dead. Until she had confirmation, she was keeping open a tiny sliver of doubt.) But whoever had downloaded that picture was now also following that trail, and she had no idea what else they might know, or dig up. “This tells them that Sean McAlister had a daughter, Beth. If they find out about his Richard St. Ives identity, they might try checking to see if Richard St. Ives has a daughter.” The thought sent a tremor along her nerve endings. “Can you see—can you search and find out if any of those names can be linked to Richard St. Ives?”

  He nodded and started typing.

  Bianca held her breath and watched the screen.

  “Richard St. Ives comes up,” Doc said. “Actually, forty-seven of them come up—a dentist, an international business consultant, a hardware store owner, a truck driver, a ski instructor. Just about everything you can think of except a big-time thief. There’s a whole bunch of biographical stuff about each one. The important thing is, none of them show a connection to Mason Thayer or Sean McAlister—or Bianca St. Ives. I’m not saying that none of them are him. I’m just saying that there’s no traceable connection—no birth dates, no previous addresses, no employment history, etcetera linking them—which for our purposes is the same thing.”

  “Thank God.” Bianca breathed a little easier. Her not-father had been a pro at constructing false identities.

  “What about a picture?” She was thinking of facial recognition software.

  Doc clicked something and nodded at the screen. “Right there.”

  Bianca looked. None of the forty-seven faces looking back at her from the neat rows that filled the screen bore any resemblance to her not-father.

  “He’s covered his tracks,” Bianca said. Of course he had. Like her, he rarely left anything to chance. “Would you do that for my name—for Bianca St. Ives?”

  Doc did. There were thirty-six Bianca St. Ives, and twenty-eight Bianca Stives. In the US alone.

  When the neat rows of pictures of Bianca St. Ives/Stives filled the screen, one of them was her. It came from the eight (that’s right, eight) business licenses she’d been required to obtain before opening Guardian Consulting.

  That was one too many pictures for Bianca’s peace of mind, but given the fact that she existed as a business owner in the modern world of Google and search engines, what could you do?

  Your best to make sure you don’t look like you, that’s what.

  For her business licenses, driver’s license and other official photos, she had worn a dark blond wig in a cut that was inches longer on one side than the other. The asymmetrical bob concealed her temples, ears and the sides of her face. It was styled with long, piece-y bangs that hung down over her forehead and had a section covering her nose bridge area, which was a key facial landmark and identifying feature. A prosthetic nose tip added scant millimeters to her nose, but it was enough to alter that biometric marker without changing her appearance very much to the naked eye. The computer expects to encounter symmetry, so she had made up each side of her face differently, subtly creating different peaks and valleys and altering the shape of her eyes and mouth.

  What she had to worry about was facial recognition software: measurements being read by machines. Computers routinely scanned millions of photos, comparing the approximately eighty nodal points that made up a recognizable image with the image they were programmed to locate. Every human face had individual, distinguishable landmarks. The key to defeating facial recognition technology was to alter those landmarks. Fooling a standard surveillance camera was easy enough: in most cases a big grin would do the trick. If she wanted to get more sophisticated, they had hoodies with antisurveillance technology built in and Carnegie Mellon had developed some nifty tortoiseshell glasses that were printed with a pattern that was perceived by a computer as the facial details of another person.

  In other words, if she was wearing those glasses, the computer would scan her image and see, say, Taylor Swift.

  But big grins weren’t allowed on most ID photos. Neither were hoodies, or funky, image-altering glasses. And probably having a computer spot Taylor Swift in a batch of Savannah, Georgia, business licenses would be counterproductive in terms of deflecting attention.

  “That’s you.” Doc pointed to her picture. He glanced up at her. “On a really bad hair day?”

  “The point was to defeat facial recognition software.”

  “That might work.” The fact that he didn’t sound sold wasn’t reassuring. “Something bad going down?”

  “Maybe,” Bianca said. The need for silence had been drummed into her literally from birth—Keep your cards close to your vest was one of the rules—but the hard, cold truth was that if she was going to survive this she needed help. Doc was the best hope she had for keeping the computer bloodhounds at bay.

  “Yes,” she amended. She wasn’t going to tell him everything, but she was going to tell him enough so that he could do his cyberwizard thing. The whole test-tube, genetically enhanced super-soldier deal—that he didn’t need to know. That nobody needed to know. It unsettled her to discover that she was deeply uncomfortable with what she apparently was. She was ashamed of it, horrified by it, afraid that if anybody found out she would be viewed as a freak or a monster or—or a thing.

  To say nothing of the fact that what she was was the reason whoever was after her wanted her dead.

  If he knew the truth, Doc would be
in deadly danger, too.

  Oh, God, was just being around her putting him in danger? What about Evie and Hay?

  The thought made her insides twist.

  “Boss?” Doc prompted.

  “I think someone is out to kill me,” she said. “The same people who are after my—” she almost said not-father “—Mason Thayer. I think they’re looking for me, and among other things they’re using the internet to try to find me.”

  A tap on the door interrupted.

  “Bee?” It was Evie, reminding her of the time. “You’re cutting it close.”

  Deep breath.

  “I’m just going,” Bianca called back. Evie’s voice, the reminder of her obligations as Bianca St. Ives, president and CEO of Guardian Consulting, steadied her. Somewhere, a shadow posse of assassins might be hunting her like hounds after a fox.

  She still had to make payroll. And pay the rent. And eat.

  Unless and until she decided to cut and run.

  Which was starting to look like a choice she might have to make.

  “Come on,” she said to Doc. “We have a presentation to get through. We can talk on the way.”

  * * *

  The presentation went well. Afterward, Les Harper walked them down to the lobby of the Cymba International building. Les was around thirty, of average height and weight, medium brown hair in a banker’s cut, medium blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses, regular features. Attractive without being handsome. He possessed an upper-crust lineage, an Ivy League education, a pile of family money, a pleasant personality and at least two nice suits, the one he’d worn to Evie’s that night for dinner and the one he was wearing now. Unfortunately, Bianca was not even remotely attracted to him. Also, right now she had other things on her mind than dating.

  Like staying alive.

  “I’ll have more free time after the holidays,” Bianca told him as he saw her off. A moment before he’d asked her to dinner, anytime she was available. She’d turned him down, she hoped gently. “We’re just so busy right now.”

  “I understand.” Les released her hand, which he’d held on to after they’d finished their goodbye handshake. “The holidays are a busy time for all of us. Well, maybe you can save me a dance tonight at the Preservation League party.”